Small victories are a great thing. They are time to relax, celebrate and reflect on what you have accomplished. That what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger and that what we accomplish makes us greater. Every small victory is a milestone on the road to success.
.
One of my favourite events here at TheCodeFactory was when we were doing The Ottawa Network series of events on Entrepreneurship. Jay Lawrence (Infonium), Mike Ball (Loyalty Match) and Nikhil Adnani (thinkRF) were doing a panel on starting up. It was a bit of a misery loves company kind of session, but in a way that everyone bonded with them, where the founders where showing their wounds. Mike Ball said something that really struck a chord with me and is the inspiration for this post. “Remember to celebrate your victories large and small”. Sage words.

Small victories are part of the good of entrepreneurship. The harder you work for them the sweeter the victory.

Victory is won not in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later, win a little more.”
- Louis L’Amour

Ian Graham

Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Featured by Ian
5 Comments »

Looking for an amazing opportunity to work with great people and cool technology then check out Students and Start-ups 5.

Sign up here.

The Huston effect prevents us from naming this event after any Start Wars episodes. However, we thought lets have an “Own the start-up podium” event. This is your chance to meet up close and personal with some amazing Ottawa start-up talent. The really great part about is that they are looking to hire in the next 3 months. So the outcome is even better than a gold medal you could get a job with some award winning companies.

These are great companies with awesome founders and TONS of potential. Here is the skinny on them;

YOUi Labs – these guys ROCK!
Voted one of CIX top 20 most Innovative companies in Canada
2009 Start-up to Watch by the Ottawa business Journal.

Infonium – Excellence – meets healthcare – meets Ruby on rails
Jay Lawrence OBJ top 40 under 40
Industry Canada recognizes Infonium as a Canadian Innovation leader

Zeebu Mobile – Awesomeness for kids and cool technology
Future – theCodeFactory 2010 start-up to watch
Written up in OBJ.

Exocortex – Gaming Excellence and bleeding edge tehcnology
2008 – TheCodeFactory Start-up to Watch
tetrahedral-based fluid simulator WOW it even sounds cool.

Blindside Networks – Education meets open source – from Carleton
2009 – TheCodeFactory Start-up to Watch
Open Source voice, video and awesomeness!

One more start-up spot available.

Ian Graham

Filed under: Camp Culture, Featured, Ottawa, Start-up, The Code Factory by Ian
1 Comment »

Philippe Casgrain is leader of the CocoaHeads of Ottawa/Gatineau one of the very first groups to make TheCodeFactory their meeting place. The CocoaHeads are a great group and have grown steadily since coming on board. They recently had a hackathon at TheCodeFactory one weekend to develop a web app for the Olympics. The following is my interview with Philippe with respect to Tweety10 development.

Where did you get the idea for Tweety10?

Mark Thistle got the idea. He already had HockeyTweet on the app store, and thought we could re-use some of the basic functionality. He sent us an email in the first days of 2010 and we all agreed it was a great idea.

Who contributed?

There were seven, then eight of us. In no particular order: Philippe Guitard, Mark Thistle, Josh Svatek, Brad Goss, Rod Cater, Jason Brennan, Brian Pirie and myself.

What was your greatest triumph?

Definitely to get seven independent developers with all sorts of constraints in the same room for eight hours, on a Sunday no less, so we could hammer out the first 80% of the app.

What was the biggest obstacle your team had to conquer? How did you do it?

Once the initial coding sprint was done, we knew we had the “other 80%” to do. The biggest problem became one of collaboration, and I suggested using BitBucket.org for doing it. It performed flawlessly, holding our wiki, issue tracker and code repository in a secure, safe and fast manner.

How does it feel to see your app in the iTunes store?

Really good! I am delighted to see it in use. We have more analytics coming in, so we’ll have final numbers soon since the Olympics are now over…

Tell me a bit about the technology you used?

The core was very much HockeyTweet, with its twitter client and lists of places. But aside from that, it’s a pretty simple list-displaying app. The cool thing is that all the data is live, pulled down from our server running on Google App Engine. We all learned how to do that from Mark, and that was pretty awesome.
.
Anything else you can think of that I should know.
.
Literally as we were submitting to the App Store, Twitter tweaked their OAuth mechanism’s identification from “oauth_pin” to “oauth-pin”. Needless to say, we scrambled quickly to fix that issue before submitting!
.
Finally, this would not have been possible without the weekend hacking rate @ The Code Factory. Can’t thank you enough for this amazing space!
.
Thank you Philippe

Filed under: Collaboration Corner, Featured, Guest Post, Ottawa, The Code Factory by Ian
No Comments »

We are going to have a new segment on this blog with guest posts and interviews of the good folks using TheCodeFactory. These are stories about some of the really good things that are being produced by “The Factory”. The articles are guest posts in the author’s own words and they have total freedom to say whatever they like.
.
One of the outcomes of TheCodeFactory I am most proud of is the organic collaboration that is happening on a daily basis. Not only are members playing together but they are also working together and collaborating on projects. This is very exciting to watch unfold and an expected by product of creative individuals working together.

Our first entry which we will be posting tomorrow is an interview with Philippe Casgrain, leader of the CocoaHeads Ottawa/Gatineau, co-creator of Tweety10 (iphone app for the Olympics) developed right here at TheCodeFactory in large part at a weekend hackathon and founding member of Cocoaminded.

Upcoming posts will include contributions and collaboration tales from;

- Fred of Blindside Networks with Pascal of Citadel Online Communities
- David (Megginson Technologies) with Michael and Dominique from Groupsia
- Chris and the amazing story of Team Camp and the awesomeness of Twegather
- Andrew Patrick on CapCHI Ottawa and our almost 2 year relationship
- Andrew Ross of FOSSLC and TheCodeFactory
- Many other tales in the works and always new stories being written every day.

I sincerely hope you enjoy this ongoing series.

Ian Graham

Filed under: Camp Culture, Collaboration Corner, Featured by Ian
No Comments »