Thanks Polyglots

Well it’s finally done. I really want to thank everyone who came and everyone who helped make it happen. All of the organizers and volunteers did a really amazing job on the day of the conference and I was told by several people that this was one of the best run un-conferences they have every been to. I’d also like to thank Boris Mann personally for helping and for encouraging us to do this. Finally, I’d like to thank my wife Tea, who saw us struggling to get ourselves organized and stepped in and picked up a whole lot of slack. I’m not sure I want to picture what it would have been without her help.

Another big thanks to Mozilla and Jeff Griffiths for the Hackathon. After days of planning and getting up early on Saturday, I actually found it quite cathartic to spend my Sunday just hacking away. I ended up building my first mobile app with Amir Barylko, an improved version of Translink’s NextBus site as a native app. We used trigger.io for this which I’ll have a short blog post on very soon. I’m actually using it daily already instead of translink’s site, so I expect this will also be my first app in the app stores too. Very exciting.

To me the whole idea of Polyglot is one that I suspect resonates with a lot of the software development community. This is that we should break out of these silo’s and walled gardens that focus on specific technologies and come together to discus far more important issues that matter to all of us. That isn’t to say technologies are not important, but that they, as a means to an end, are merely one aspect of this conversation. This is why I’m really excited that Tavis and Saem have taken it upon themselves to start a regular meetup group for exactly this purpose. Obviously, I’m not alone either, the Polyglot Vancouver meetup already has well over 150 members in only 5 days and is still growing.

Now that it’s all done I’m sure we’ll reflect a bit and consider what we might want to change or improve for next year (yes we’re doing it next year, in case you were asking). For the most part I think it wen’t even better than expected, regardless, we still learned many things during our first go at it that will help us to make next years an even better event.

So thanks for coming out and making this such a successful event. See you at the meetup!