YGingras^.net

 It's been a little over a month since I left Montréal and a lot has happened since then. The search for a new home took some time but was not nearly as painful as I was expecting it to be. I got a lovely one bedroom apartment on the corner of the building, which gives me lots of natural light. There's a lot to do and see in San Francisco but this will all have to wait because the first thing that I did once I was sure that I would eventually have a bed to sleep on, was to brew a batch of beer.

I left most of my brewing equipment in Montréal. Most of the bulky stuff is simply too affordable to justify packing having it moved across the continent. I had a pretty good stash of hops that I ended up giving away because I was more interested in seeing used for brewing than going stale in a big unrefrigerated cardboard box somewhere between Montréal and San Francisco.

I did not buy everything that I had in Montréal but fortunately, brewing does not require much. I ordered a carboy, some malt, hops, a packet of yeast, and I was ready to go.

• Full text (839 words)
• Comments (1)

The word is already out but in case you don't know yet, I'm moving to San Francisco to join Facebook. This news will be a surprise to some of you, especially since I've never been a big Facebook fan. I've always willingly shared lots of personal information about myself on this Website; the lack of privacy has never been a show stopper to me. When I stopped using Facebook, it was not on moral grounds, it was because I did not see myself as a part of their target market.

But I have only a few days left in Montréal and I can write about my reasons for moving to California at a later time. At this point, I find it urgent to mention that I've had a great time with many of you here in Montréal and that I would not want to go without drinking one more beer with all of you.

Mark the date, on Wednesday, November 16th, I invite you to join me for a 5-à-7 at Benelux, a long-time sponsor of Montréal-Python and probably the hottest pub in the tech community these days. It gets even better because Benelux likes cool people and by definition, if you know me, you certainly are very cool. This is why Benelux will give you a free beer next Wednesday; just ask me for a coupon. See you there!

• Comments (3)

Ajah, our Python powered interactive directory of funders for Canadian non-profits, was recently featured in Don Magazine. We've been in the local news before but the previous mentions were all were by the tech community. Don Magazine is a publication for non profits and it's rewarding to see that beyond the cool tech, the non-profit sector sees a real value in the service that we developed.

• Comments (66)

Last week, we had the Mondial de la bière, Montréal's international beer festival. This is a great expo-like event with over 40 craft brewers coming in town to show their creations.

The new venue is a refreshing change. The old one was getting way too crowded and it was a major challenge to move from one kiosk to the other during peek hours. With the larger venue, you have very large hallways and you can get a sense of who's on the floor by walking between the booth while drinking and having a conversation. Unfortunately, the new venue feels like a bunker: you access it from the underground city by passing a maze of up and down staircases then you arrive in this enormous hall with bare concrete walls and not a window in sight. If you think of a grey yellow-lit hallway in Quake, you are not too far from the reality.

It's OK to do a event indoor, but if you do so, do it during the winter. When I drink a beer in June, I think of a terrace and if you are not after very exclusive beers, you will get a much nicer experience on the terrace of a craft brewerie, which were all featuring some guest beers anyway.

• Full text (634 words)
• Comments (1)

We just released theSector.ca, a tool to explore the Canadian charitable sector. In a nutshell, it's an interactive directory of charities that one can use to gain insight on individual charities as well as trends such as fundraising, staffing, and expenditures across the charitable sector.

We've already covered why we believe that it's going to shake the charitable sector and now I want to take a moment to celebrate the cool tech that allowed us to make it happen.

Both Fundtracker and theSector are TurboGears 2 applications running on top of a Postgres database. In Fundtracker, we achieved very good performance through fine tuning of Postgres and sprinkling bits of denormalized data here and there. Since you need a subscription to use Fundtracker, we can keep an eye on the growth and we feel safe from overnight scalability problems but theSector being a freely accessible tool, we had to make sure that it could handle a Twitter storm and our main tool to do that is systematic denormalization into a star schema.

• Full text (723 words)
• Comments (0)

I'll be presenting at PyCon 2011. For most of my life, public speaking inspired some kind of dread in me but Montréal-Python offered me many opportunities to jump on the stage and to survive so I feel like then is hope that I will come out of this presentation alive as well. In fact, I will be talking about Montréal-Python and, among other things, how we teach members of our community through progressive acclimation that presenting your ideas to your peers is fun, stimulating, and very rarely fatal.

• Comments (2)

Brewing comes with many benefits. It's true that having over 60 liters of beer on tap means that you can party all night long then some more but really, what I like about it is that you get to drink beer styles that you'd have a hard time to get your hands on otherwise. Drinking good beer and hanging around people who know a lot about turning malt into a delightful brew broadens your knowledge of beer and allows you to taste every beer, commercial or homebrew, with a magnified perspective.

When I taste a craft beer, either from a fellow homebrewer or from a micro brewery, I experience the story someone who cares to conceive a great drink, a beer with attitude. Not a drink that is meant to please everyone, but a bold drink that punches you in the face with an intense shockwave of flavors and aromas.

Next Monday, Cinema Politica will feature Beer Wars, a documentary by Anat Baron about the struggle of craft-brewers to bring tasteful beer to the masses despite the marketing assault of the corporate mass breweries. More infos on the Cinema Politica Website.

• Comments (2)