Bolidea – Giving Rise to Stellar Companies

Participants settling in Bolidea's infamous " nipple lounge"

About 12 hacking aficionados met on Saturday the 10^th of January for the second edition of the Free Hacker’s meet up: a monthly gathering for developers, programmers and technology hackers with the goal of facilitating experimentation, discussion and project exploration of new technologies and programming languages.

After a brief introduction by Heri, the event’s organizer, the participants self-organized into smaller groups or worked alone.  Here’s a quick overview of the event’s highlights:

• Alok Mohindra broke the ice by presenting ProShorts, a financial portal for short and leveraged ETF’s. He and Michel from Laboratoires Foulab then did a bit of pair-programming with Python.
• The guys from Les laboratories Foulab made a first-time appearance extolling the virtues of their new digs and their vast repositories of hardware (just aching to be experimented with). By the way, their official “portes ouvertes au public ” Roulaize party is to be held on Saturday, February 7, 2008. Be sure to check out their nifty IRC ” security guard”– a robot programmed to protect thru a binary legend.
• Louis -Philippe Huberdeau and Marc Laporte worked contentedly on their TikiWiki CMS Groupware.
• Heri continued working on a ruby plug-in for an open micro- blogging spec ( for TechEnterprise), basing himself loosely on the micro-blogging technology of Identi.ca , whose founder and local entrepreneur Evan also made a quick appearance.
• Pierre Phaneuf continued working on his multi-player c++ video game.

Others attended the event as well, including Felipe Coimbra from YowTrip; however, I did not have a chance to delve into everyone’s programming endeavors and hopefully will do so next time.

Finally, as Heri mentioned in his last write-up of the FreeHackers’ meet up, there was no specific structure adopted at the event –a characteristic admittedly loved by some participants while others expressed a need for more structure. As such,  depending on each participant’s personal objectives, some stayed for the length of the whole event, others dropped in for a few hours, some worked on a group project while others obtained a quick solution to a problem ( as was the case with Alwin Tong‘s multi-touch mouse hack).

Free Hacker's schedule

Overall, it was very rewarding to see familiar faces, but also to gain fresh energy and perspective from newcomers. Seeing as this is a group event, your comments and suggestions about the event and its future format are warmly welcomed. Free Hackers was once again a great success, and we at Bolidea look forward to the next one!