Vancouver Pixel Crafters

Want to meet word-class speakers from all over the world and learn more about building reliable, scalable and robust systems? Interested in NoSQL databases like Riak? How the concurrency is changing the landscape of development?

Then you should absolutely attend Erlang Factory Lite 2012 here in Vancouver. We’re bringing a variety of high profile speakers and guests from all around the world. We’ll be having speakers from such companies as Opscode, Heroku, Basho, Vocalocity and others.

Doesn’t matter whether you know Erlang or don’t, use it or won’t, this is the event you can’t miss if you’re in software development business. 

To learn more about speakers & sessions, visit our page on Lanyrd. We’re still adding information on speakers and their talks.

Don’t miss this opportunity. It is going to be one hell of an event!

Registration is available at Eventbrite

I’m in town next week, what events are happening? Which meetups should I join? Where do I find out about events going on in Vancouver? When I’m planning an event, how do I find out if I’m conflicting with existing plans? Where can I book some space for my event?

All of these are hard questions to answer when the information is spread between multiple silos of information. But, we’re not going to *solve* the fact that people will keep using different places to post information. So, how do we aggregate this calendar information as well as give people a default place to look for venues and upcoming events?

Enter the Calagator

It turns out that other tech communities have faced this issue before. The community in Portland runs a piece of code called Calagator. It’s available as open source on Github so we checked it out and setup our own version for Vancouver.

The making of VanCal

The suggestion to check out Calagator came from Luke Closs. I hacked at it a bit and realized that I was going to need some Ruby help, and got introduced to Rafael Chacón by Tavis Rudd.

Rafael got straight to work and got Calagator up and running on Heroku. We’ve called it VanCal and it lives at vancal.pixelcrafters.ca. Want to make code changes and improvements? Pull requests gladly accepted github.com/PixelCrafters/calagator!

Want to do something interesting with the data? The events page has a variety of feed formats and the venues page has KML and JSON versions available.

VanCal for users

VanCal is a collaborative, unified calendar, as it says on the about page, which is lightly edited from the Calagator original.

VanCal is designed as a wiki-like system - anyone can currently import, add, edit, and even delete events and venues. A variety of Meetup groups and Google Calendars (Startup Digest and Vancouver HackSpace) have been imported as an experiment. A couple of coworking spaces (The Hive, The Network Hub) have been added as example venues.

Remember: the point is not to REPLACE anyone’s list of events, but rather bring all of them together in one place, and not at the mercy of any one company or organization. Although you are free to use VanCal “natively” - tagging and venue linking makes it easy to just get a list of “your” events.

Individual events or calendar feeds can be added on the import page, and there is also a bookmarklet on that page that makes it easy to import events as you come across them.

There are several other cool features related to tagging events and API integration. For instance, tag something with its Plancast mirror, and it will show attendees - see the GROW Conference entry for an example. Upcoming and Meetup.com features still need investigation.

Or, you can just drive up to the front page and see what’s happening over the next two weeks. Want to keep up to date? Subscribe to the calendar or Atom feeds to find out about new items as they get added.

What’s Next

I want to again thank Rafael for getting us this far. Consider it a beta. Let’s keep discussing what this should be in the Github issues or the wiki.

The look and feel definitely need a make over (as does this Pixel Crafters site itself). Is this interesting? Should we keep going? What else should it do? Do you want to help? Leave a comment, let us know!