Event Archive

Anu's Take

If Planner came with your Microsoft 365 licence and you've never opened the AI side of it, this is a good lunch hour to change that. Most people I work with were never actually trained on these tools. They were handed a login. Jeff is covering both Planner and ClickUp, and you may come away with one or two things to try that same afternoon. Grab your lunch and join in!

Anu's Take

So looking forward to talking about all things year-end payroll related. Richard is going to fill us all in on the bookkeeping magic we need to invoke to get this done right the first time...I hope. If the responsibility of generating T4s lands on your desk every winter, come along.

Anu's Take

If you lead engineers, this one's worth your Monday evening. I treat AI as a confident first drafter that gets you most of the way there, and the rest still takes someone who knows what good looks like. You may not leave with answers, but you'll likely find others working through the same questions. If you think you fit the bill and want to be in the room, contact Rob Bennett and let him know you heard about it on Where's Anu.

Anu's Take

If you've read The Alignment Problem, this is a chance to hear Brian Christian work through it in person. I use AI every day, and I still believe it's no substitute for professional judgment. Who decides what these systems should value is a question for all of us, so bring yours.

Anu's Take

In addition to the leaves changing colour, scratch that, we're not in Ontario anymore, the one thing I look forward to in the fall is regular Green Drinks programming. I'm especially looking forward to this one as it's the first one since the Victoria Tech Week gala. Curious to chat with people post-VTW26 hangover.

Anu's Take

This is going to be a good one. So looking forward to joining my fellow Victoria Data Society board members in bringing this event to Victoria. It's well overdue, and think of it as primer leading up to the Prompt Victoria AI conference in November.

Anu's Take

Students finishing computer science programs, and those thinking of starting, keep asking me if AI is hurting their chances. The job hunt feels harder, and some are rethinking it altogether. I understand the worry, but I'm optimistic. AI will speed up the work and make it better, but it still takes someone who knows the field to decide what's worth doing and catch it when it's wrong, so there has really never been a better time to get into STEM, as long as schools and programs can quickly pivot to the new reality. STEM has been in demand for a long time, and this feels like an adjustment. I'd hate for short-term pain, real and perceived, to cost us our future strength. We've never had enough resources in this field, and Canada becoming the global powerhouse we can be starts with more STEM. I think we'll figure out how to harness them. That's where a night like this comes in. Five women, from grad school to working in the field, will share how they got there. Add entrepreneurship and business to these programs, and that's a recipe for success. Know a student on the fence? Send them.

Anu's Take

BSidesVI is nineteen days before this one, so October is when the debriefs land. The listing already expects lessons learned and things that didn't quite work, which is the half of any conference nobody submits as a talk. Looking forward to that, among other things.

Anu's Take

I have way too much fun with their workshops. I can't even begin to imagine what their social is going to be like.

Anu's Take

Five kilometres and 350 metres, which is Finlayson's shape with a little taken off the top. It falls on the Sunday of the long weekend, so the real question is not the climb but whether you want it in your legs the day before Thanksgiving dinner.

Anu's Take

Should be a good one. If there's a decision you keep pushing to next week, this is the place to bring it, and you may leave with a good next move, or at least find out that you're not the only one faced with challenging decisions. If you think you fit the bill and want to be in the room, contact Rob Bennett and let him know you heard about it on Where's Anu.

Anu's Take

Data & Beer has left the brewery. Phillips in September, a bistro inside a billiards hall on Douglas this time, and a shorter walk from most desks at five o'clock. It lands the day after TEDxVictoria, so the room should arrive still chewing over somebody else's ideas, with no agenda here to compete.

Anu's Take

A skill used to mean something a person spent years acquiring. Now it is a folder of plain text that runs the same on Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot. The last time I was on a panel in this room, the question was which platform to back. This is the first answer I have seen that holds whichever one you pick.

Anu's Take

It's fall, school is back, and STEM is front and centre. This open house is worth a look, and it's the first of back-to-back Wednesdays in October where STEM is in the conversation, followed by Future Innovators. My fellow Victoria Data Society board member Alyssa Foote is a Senior Laboratory Instructor in this program, which UVic started in 1981 as Canada's first health informatics program. Know someone curious about health tech? Send them.

Anu's Take

TEDx! Enough said. It's back for another year, and you don't have to get on a boat to be there in person.

Anu's Take

TEDxVictoria opens at nine the next morning, which makes this the last ordinary Tuesday before the week becomes an occasion. Laptops, a table in a billiards hall, nobody with a talk prepared. The lack of an occasion is the point.

Anu's Take

Show Your Work was last Tuesday, and naming the one after it No Victory Lap is a pointed piece of scheduling. "Back to the lab," says the description. Whatever last week earned you, the calendar has already moved on.

Anu's Take

Three thousand members, a claimed two hundred billion in collective impact behind them, and volunteers running the whole thing since 2015. Bohdan is in from Toronto for two hours of it. People who build something that size rarely make themselves this easy to meet.

Anu's Take

Most of the cost here is decided before you start, by which level a contract lands you on. Canada's own programme runs 13 controls at Level 1, 98 at Level 2 and 200 at Level 3, and the top two are still under development. So the useful hour is the one that tells you which of those you are looking at, rather than how to pass it.

Anu's Take

Eight kilometres with 250 metres of climbing, which on paper is the easiest week yet. The difficulty has moved rather than gone: it is in the roots and rock underfoot the whole way, and in a forty-five minute drive, the longest this schedule has asked for.

Anu's Take

Unfortunately I won't be able to attend, but am there in spirit. Please have some pancakes in my honour. Just kidding. Anything will do.

Anu's Take

I went to the Victoria edition of this one and came away genuinely impressed, which is not a given with conferences. A few of the takeaways have stuck with me all year. Amaan puts on a good day, and it is worth the drive, or the transit, out to Surrey. I will catch the next Victoria edition myself.

Anu's Take

A Vancouver series has put exactly one night on the board in Victoria, and Early Bird has already sold out. Bazett did his own undergrad at UVic, went off to Toronto and Cincinnati, and came back here to teach. More than 600,000 people now watch him explain this material on YouTube. Forty-five minutes, then the floor opens.

Anu's Take

The last Show Your Work was definitely worth my time. The demos were the draw, but the part I keep coming back to is the discussion after each one, when the room stops being an audience and starts being useful. What I want to see this time is who comes back, and whether anyone took the feedback or pivoted somewhere else because of it.

Anu's Take

Tech Week wraps on the 25th and the Tuesday after is the first quiet room on the calendar. That makes it the one I would pick to work out what actually mattered from the week before: no programme, no panel, just laptops and whoever is still chewing over what they saw. Easing back into the normal cadence, with the benefit of everyone else's notes.

Anu's Take

'Typical timelines' is carrying a lot of weight on this agenda, and Ottawa publishes the real numbers. A complex reliability screening runs 120 business days, and a secret clearance adds up to another 120 on top of that. Separately, 123 Defence's own eligibility questionnaire asks whether your leadership will commit a year of time and resources before you begin. Those are the same fact told twice.

Anu's Take

The detail that stuck with me is the pitch format: three minutes, no slide deck, bring the product if you have one. Somewhere out there a founder is on version nine of a deck that will never be opened in this room, which may be the most useful thing this event does all day. Victoria is the last qualifier before the national final in Mississauga, so whoever wins gets a month to work out what they actually said. If your pitch only works with the pictures, this is a good place to find that out.

Anu's Take

Nine kilometres, and the shortest drive of the lot to reach the start of it. 'Rugged and overgrown in places' is a phrase doing a lot of quiet work in that listing.

Anu's Take

Whoever put five hours of unstructured time on a published agenda was being honest about how these things go. By the Friday of tech week the room has already sorted itself out. That is a better door policy than anything you could write down.

Anu's Take

Read the run sheet before deciding what this is. One hour of panel, then the roof until late, so it is a party with a panel attached rather than the other way round. That suits a launch better than a programme would, and it leaves time to actually look at the place. Put the Jiffy Pop on the fire.

Anu's Take

In 2006 Wilkinson was pulling espresso in this city for six dollars an hour and teaching himself web design between shifts. He is now Executive Chair of the holding company that owns the agency he built out of that. The listing is one line and the venue turned up late, which is either confidence or a to-do, and the arc is worth the hour regardless.

Anu's Take

Matthew is based out of Austin, so catch him in person while you can. He has a very firm grasp on this, and he eats his own dog food: fourteen open patent families, some of them his, and a recent one he deliberately ran the way he tells clients to, thirty thousand words of transcripts and images handed to a drafting attorney with no restrictions on the AI. Most guidance on this subject arrives from a safe distance.

Anu's Take

Good to see AOT on the Tech Week bill, and it is not the first time they have turned up on a local programme this year: two of their people were on the Data Day speaker list back in June. The case for the afternoon is that this is a shop with a product of its own, formsflow.ai, built and maintained in the open, so the three sessions come from people who have to keep something running rather than from people with a deck. Opening their own office to do it is the right instinct too.

Anu's Take

North House is going for it. This and their own launch party on the same day, which is a lot of Friday to take on in a week where everyone is already run down. Owen, Jared and Lautaro. Bound to be illuminating, and VIBE-filled.

Anu's Take

The agenda landed, and five of the twelve talks are about AI or agentic systems, mostly as the attacker rather than the tool. One is a deep dive on Shai-Hulud, the first self-replicating worm npm has actually had, which hit hundreds of packages and, in its later form, wipes the home directory if it cannot find anywhere left to spread. That is the advantage of a volunteer programme over a vendor one: it tracks what happened this year instead of what sells.

Anu's Take

I think the last one was in April, and five months of silence from a group that never published a schedule in the first place is easy to read as finished. Happy to be wrong. It comes back with the format untouched: no speakers, no sponsors, and a bill the pub divides by six on the honour system. Tech Week is a week of agendas, and this one has none by design.

Anu's Take

Good to see Cynthia Lynam on the agenda. The argument that AI made answers cheap and did nothing much for the questions is easy to nod along to and much harder to practise, which is what makes it worth an hour. Fernwood Agentic takes the other half, back for a second month running.

Anu's Take

The client wall is the interesting part: Phillips Brewing & Malting, Denman Island Chocolate, Rockland Scientific and VitaminLab. A brewery, a chocolate maker, an ocean instruments company and a vitamin company, with nothing in common except that nobody sold the machine they needed. Automation usually means software taking over a task. This is the older version, where someone has to build the thing first.

Anu's Take

Seven of fourteen seats are up this year, so half the board turns over. Voting happens online in the weeks before, and the AGM is where the new board gets introduced. Two hours of networking around a thirty minute meeting is a fair trade.

Anu's Take

Most of Tech Week happens inside four blocks downtown. This one is out at Finnerty Road, a stage earlier, where the ventures are still closer to a lab than a raise. Registration closes the day before, so it is not a walk-up.

Anu's Take

Ukraine is innovating on the battlefield at a pace never seen before. This is your opportunity to hear about the how and why, without having to enter the theatre.

Anu's Take

Finally, a Tech Week stop where someone makes something you can actually hold. Take the tour, watch the machines earn their keep, and skip the AI demo for an hour.

Anu's Take

Worth an hour if the defence market is anywhere on next year's list, and the reason is Karl Swannie. He built Echosec here, selling open-source intelligence to national security and public safety buyers, and Flashpoint bought it in 2022, so the room holds someone who finished the route rather than only people mapping it. There is a quiet joke in the structure too: the readiness programme being previewed is subsidised by PacifiCan, so Ottawa is funding the lessons on how to sell to Ottawa.

Anu's Take

Worth the hour for the building as much as the process. It went up in 1892 to power Victoria's streetcars, built for $15,000 after the tram company's earlier plant burned. One station, a whole network. The same walls now turn out one bottle at a time.

Anu's Take

This one is aimed at people who have been in tech long enough to have a few stories they do not tell at conferences. Most of the week is about what to build and who to sell it to; this hour is about the person doing the building. 'Earned scar tissue' in the listing is the tell: frank rather than therapeutic.

Anu's Take

The global write-up promises a cafe central to each city. Victoria has run four of these out of borrowed offices instead, which is either a supply problem or a quiet admission that the coffee was never really the point. Half past eight is early enough to work as a filter, and what gets through it tends to be people who actually wanted the conversation.

Anu's Take

Worth the evening if you want the version of Victoria tech that predates the word ecosystem. Victoria Free-Net came up in November 1992, and two years later it was running twenty-one dial-in modems for more than nine thousand registered members. Its sponsor list included the Vancouver Island Advanced Technology Centre, which is VIATEC under its old name. I have never found a decent written account of any of it, which is the real argument for hearing it said out loud.

Anu's Take

Go for the site as much as the occasion. Cement production here exhausted the limestone in 1912, and Jennie Butchart started hauling topsoil into the emptied quarry next door, which is now the Sunken Garden people queue for. A fundraiser to restore the half nobody turned into a garden is a considerably better premise than the usual room with a bar.

Anu's Take

Last year's was a good time, and I am pretty sure I closed the place down with a couple of other key players. Same room as this year, so the Union Club is a return rather than the first it is billed as. Not that it matters much once you are through the door.

Anu's Take

Two schools whose business is credentials are hosting a panel you can walk into with none. The invitation is unusually plain about it: no background, no education, no previous experience, just an interest in where the work might go. The panellists are still unnamed, which for a forty-seat room is either confidence or a booking in progress.

Anu's Take

Fifty seats, approval required, and a guest list aimed at the people who actually decide how their organisations change. The agenda is the unglamorous half of AI: what to hold onto, what to unlearn, how to bring people along. In my experience that last one is where it quietly stalls.

Anu's Take

Ownership is the whole argument here. A community can host the generation and still watch the value leave, and which way that goes is usually settled in the financing structure long before anything gets built. One speaker named so far and she is on the capital side rather than the developer side, which is the right end to start from.

Anu's Take

The program changed more in March than it had in years. Bill C-15 doubled the enhanced expenditure limit to $6 million and opened the 35% refundable credit to Canadian public companies for the first time. Whatever you were told about eligibility before that is worth re-checking, and these are the people who would know.

Anu's Take

As a tenth generation farm boy from Ontario, the circular economy is very dear to my heart. Dear enough that I took the circular economy micro-credentials course at BCIT a few years back. The premise here is the one that matters: circular materials do not fail on chemistry, they stall on everything around the product.

Anu's Take

Worth the lunch hour, and the reason is that nobody is only one of the eight. Unlike Myers-Briggs, play personalities stack: most people carry several at once. The persona panels I run against generative AI do not work that way. Each voice is one clean type, and real people never are.

Anu's Take

'What problems should we solve' is usually followed by 'why'. Sometimes it arrives the other way around, depending on how the quarter has gone. Either way the job underneath is the same: solve problems, make people happy. Everything else is a feature nobody asked for.

Anu's Take

'Blue economy' normally turns up as a phrase inside a funding announcement. This is the version where the companies bring their equipment to the pier and the people who built it stand next to it. COAST has since published the full roster, nineteen of them, and the first edition put 210 registrations on the same pier last October as part of an ocean-mapping conference, so moving it inside Tech Week should widen that a fair bit.

Anu's Take

The range is the reason to go. A bioprinting company, a sustainable goods company and an ADHD tools company do not share a playbook, so the same question should come back with three genuinely different answers.

Anu's Take

Did someone say AI governance? Right up my alley. The part I want to see is the example he picked. It is a real community project, not a made-up one, and it belongs to a group that sits right beside his own company. Both of them have already published where the line falls between the community work and the paid work. Testing your own rules against that is harder than talking about them.

Anu's Take

If marine tech is your wheelhouse, register now and worry about the details later, because there are none yet. Speakers and programme are both still to come, so what you actually have to go on is the topic and the person running it. That second part is enough. Chris has been running Green Drinks Victoria for years and I do not think I have been to one of his that was not worth the evening.

Anu's Take

Worth a look if you build, finance or approve housing, and mostly for the sequencing. Two earlier sessions catalogued why delivery is slow and costly; this is the first one where companies turn up with tools aimed at that list. The listing still promises three angles and names two, so you are booking on the premise rather than the lineup.

Anu's Take

A tour of women-founded businesses, with the driving done by HeyYa, which is women-led itself and only arrived in Victoria in 2025. The route is still to be announced. If this is your morning, passing it on.

Anu's Take

This was the first in-person event I went to in Victoria, and it is the one that stuck. Almost two years on I am still going back regularly, which says more about the room than it does about my consistency. If you are looking for a first door into this scene, this is a good one.

Anu's Take

Most weeks the room is a room. Naming one after the city sets a different expectation: that what you are working on has somewhere to go beyond the table you built it at. Easy to say, harder to programme, worth turning up to see which it is.

Anu's Take

The useful thing about this one is who is on the panel: four founders in their twenties, on what they have actually got AI doing, rather than another room of Gen Xers forecasting what it will do next. The billing is what is running, what it took to get working, and where a person is still required. Owen has also published a list of what they still need, down to a mic and someone on the door, which is the same candour the panel is promising, pointed at their own event.

Anu's Take

Their own site publishes numbers, not just a commitment: dollars distributed, projects funded, youth supported. Publishing a number is a harder commitment than a statement of intent, and pre-launch is the moment to ask what it looks like at scale.

Anu's Take

The gap between building something and explaining it is old, well documented, and still unsolved. What has changed is that a growing share of the handoffs in between no longer runs through a person at all: one system summarises for another, and whatever made the product worth buying quietly does not survive the trip. Panels like this one tend to get lively enough to go there, which is the part I would want to hear.

Anu's Take

Worth the afternoon if you are raising in the next twelve months, and the reason is the second half. The panel runs an hour, the social runs ninety minutes, and a room built by a national law firm, a bank and a local fund is one you want the extra time in. The advertised subject is how the AI boom moved valuations and terms, which is genuinely unsettled. The part about planning liquidity years in advance is the advice everybody gets free and takes late.

Anu's Take

What the listing leaves out is the site's history. It opened in 1999 as an entertainment centre called Playzone, the controls company moved in five years later, and the LEED Platinum certification only landed in 2013. Worth the afternoon if you want to see what a building looks like when the people who automate buildings for a living have to work in one.

Anu's Take

Go for the second account. Angel Forum invites investors and founders both, so the same raise gets told from both ends of the table, in one room. Twenty-five years of running forums means the bad ones in the billing are real cases and not a device, and a founder's version of a no is rarely the same document as the investor's.

Anu's Take

'Physical AI' is this year's headline term, and right now it stretches to cover almost anything. What makes this hour useful is the vantage point. ROK counts the stack from bare metal up. Firmware first, then the controls a person actually touches, and only then anything with a browser in it. Ask that room where AI belongs in a device and you get an engineering answer rather than a trend line.

Anu's Take

The most extreme rogue wave ever recorded, 17.6 metres off Ucluelet, was caught by one of their buoys, and a UVic researcher put the odds of it at once in 1,300 years. Now the people who built that instrument are opening the door and standing next to it. Easy yes.

Anu's Take

The claim worth turning up for is not the immersive tech, it is that human skills become measurable once a team is under a clock. Most of this genre asserts the outcome and measures nothing, so a testable version is a step forward. Read the listing closely though: this is billed as research, which means you are not the audience, you are the sample.

Anu's Take

The listing does not mention that this is one stop on a run that has already been through Tel Aviv and Shenzhen. Victoria is on that list because Alhwyn and Jia Ming put it on, one based here and one who runs the Calgary and Toronto rooms. Neither is doing this for the first time, which is the main reason to bother.

Anu's Take

Victoria Tech Week opens on the Monday, and this is where it starts: a room of the people leading the teams pushing hardest on how software actually gets built. The year's question is what engineering leadership is for once the agents write most of the code. Not a bad thing to open a week on.

Anu's Take

Worth the two hours for the second half. The opening discussion sets the framing; the mini sessions are the product, which is past TEDx speakers and local experts working on your own talk or pitch. That kind of time usually comes with an invoice, and here it is a suggested ten dollars into their community ticket bank.

Anu's Take

Worth the trip out of downtown, and it is a trip. The distillery sits outside Lime's service area, which stops at the city limits: past that line the bike loses its motor and there is nowhere to end the ride. Work out how you are getting home before you set off, because the afternoon closes with a whisky tasting and you should not be riding after that either.

Anu's Take

This is a topic that needs a lot more attention than it is currently getting, so it is good to see it start bubbling up to the top. The interesting part is who is delivering it: a Meta-certified trainer is the one calling this the awkward teenage phase. I do wonder what Cory Doctorow would make of that, since an advertiser losing visibility and control is stage three of Enshittification almost to the letter.

Anu's Take

Round 2. Closes out the week right into BSidesVI.

Anu's Take

The question on this agenda with actual teeth is what gets disclosed to clients and what does not. Everyone billing for marketing work has settled that one quietly by now, project by project, and almost nobody says their answer out loud with competitors in the room. Ross Dunn has been broadcasting about search since 2009, on what is still the longest-running SEO podcast going, so he has watched several cycles arrive that were going to change everything. Whether this one is different is the interesting part.

Anu's Take

If Désirée is running this, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a great time, and if this subject matter piques your interest, run, don't walk to register.

Anu's Take

René has been in the agentic coding space longer than most, and he spoke at Prompt last year. Him moving back to Calgary was Victoria's loss. Happy to have him here as often as we can get him, so get him while he is here, before he makes like a pumpkin and heads back over the mountains.

Anu's Take

Go for the specifics, not the thesis. Everyone nods along when someone says listen to your customers, and almost nobody can name the one sentence that actually changed the product. The numbers page on his own site opens with Mr. Clean: three times the sales on a brand that had been sliding for a decade, which is a gloriously odd thing to be carrying into a room of software founders. Second year he has helped run Tech Week, so he knows what this crowd will sit still for.

Anu's Take

Pretty much every story this year about an agent going rogue turns out, on inspection, to be a story about permissions. Not the model misbehaving: a key left somewhere convenient, a token scoped to everything, an approval step nobody added. A talk that spends its time on access architecture rather than prompt craft is aimed at the right half of the problem.

Anu's Take

Five kilometres and four hundred metres of climbing, which is the steepest thing on the whole schedule folded into one of its shortest walks. Distance is the number people plan around, and it is the wrong one here.

Anu's Take

The first one was excellent, and it came with more pizza than the room could physically get through. My Mona the Octocat plush sits on my desk. The second reads like more of the same, which is the compliment rather than the complaint. I can't make this one.

Anu's Take

A warmup for Victoria Tech Week, four days before the week itself opens. PMI VI's listing never mentions it, so the timing is either luck or nobody said it out loud. One room of people who run projects for a living, before the week spreads out across the city.

Anu's Take

'Defence market' reads as primes and twenty-year contracts, which is why most small companies never look twice. The Business Development Bank puts small and medium firms at 92 percent of the businesses already in the sector, and 40 percent of its jobs. This one is the map rather than the bid: who buys, how government and the primes buy differently, and where a supplier your size would sit underneath them.

Anu's Take

If you want a preview of BSidesVI, this is the single best place and night to get one. It is the regular room for Island cyber security professionals, and where the BSidesVI team spends its downtime. Nine days before the conference opens, with no formal presentation and nothing to prepare.

Anu's Take

Worth the evening for the buy-in half. An executive approving a data programme and an organization that actually decides things differently are two separate events, and the gap between them is where most of this work quietly dies. Travis is giving this one in his own office rather than as a visiting consultant, which usually means the examples arrive with their edges still on.

Anu's Take

Go for the floor, not the stages. Two of the four are streamed and recorded, so the headline talks reach you at home for a fraction of what the trip costs, and what does not travel is the exhibition hall, the other two stages and whoever you end up standing next to. Worth doing that arithmetic before booking anything.

Anu's Take

Go for the room, not the program, which is convenient this month because there isn't one: I have been to a few of these and the spread of people is the point. It started as the Vic West Breakfast Club back when it really was in Vic West, at the hotel across the bridge, and has been wandering ever since. I think the last one I attended was at John's Place. Wish I was in town for this one.

Anu's Take

Still Tuesday, still downtown, still worth the trip. The projects turn over every week; the standing invitation doesn't.

Anu's Take

Every project has a window before anyone is watching, and it is the only stretch where changing your mind is still cheap. Naming a build night after it is a good instinct.

Anu's Take

I look forward to this one every month, which is not something I say about a recurring meeting. Most editions come with a speaker and a subject; the round table is the format I prefer, because the subject ends up being whatever the room walked in carrying. In a profession where a lot of people are quietly solving the same problem on their own, an open floor earns its place.

Anu's Take

Five kilometres in week one, eight in week two, and Nick's own difficulty note has quietly acquired the phrase 'steep sections'. Either the series is finding its level or it is finding out who is still free on Sundays.

Anu's Take

Normally 7:30 a.m., and it went by Breakfast Roundtable for most of the year. For the session about money they moved it to noon, which I think last happened in March. Of all the topics to earn the civilised hour.

Anu's Take

A social called Data & Beer, at a brewery, twelve days before autumn officially starts. The venue has moved across town to Rock Bay, so anyone navigating from memory ends up in Uptown looking at the wrong parking lot. Phillips has a kitchen in there now, which improves the odds of the good conversations outlasting the first pint.

Anu's Take

Rachel is one of the earlier faces in Victoria's AI scene, which means she is talking from a couple of years of the actual work rather than from this month's news cycle. The last time we shared a stage here, four of us spent it debating which platform wins. She has the room to herself this time, and her premise is that the call should not default to the loudest technical voice. Guilty, and worth hearing anyway.

Anu's Take

Victoria's tech calendar has quietly settled on Tuesday, which works right up until three good things land on the same one. So this sits on a Wednesday, at four, in a pub rather than a boardroom. Never on Tuesdays.

Anu's Take

Plenty of the ambition here ends up somewhere with more capital, so a standing Tuesday for people building from Victoria is worth having on its own terms. No pitch, no showcase, no audience, just the people who keep coming back to it.

Anu's Take

Term's back, so expect more students at the table. Some of the sharpest questions in this room come from the people who only just started asking them.

Anu's Take

Worth the drive if you are building anything on the mid-island, and I have made that drive. No speaker, no sponsor slot and no program: thirty seconds each to introduce yourself, then two hours of the room sorting itself out. Graham still promises to remind people to circulate, which suggests he knows how these evenings usually go. That is the whole product, and it works.

Anu's Take

Most of what makes this worth the morning is not on the listing. John Dean handed the province the first thirty-two hectares of this hill in 1921 and four neighbours added to it; it is a hundred and seventy-four now, protecting one of the last old-growth Douglas fir and Garry oak stands on the Saanich Peninsula. A century of people deciding to leave something alone, which is a rarer achievement than anything I will ship this quarter. Number one of ten, so there is no penalty for finding out early whether this is your kind of Sunday.

Anu's Take

A full day of Microsoft 365, Copilot and AI sessions across three tracks. Last year's debut sold out and I'd expect this one to as well. The quiet reminder underneath all of it: most of the Copilot features on stage are already sitting inside licences people pay for every month and have never opened. A summit like this earns its keep if the room goes home and finally turns the thing on.

Anu's Take

Introduce yourself with your favourite colour in hex and the room learns more about you than a job title would. #FF0000 is a personality. So is having to go and look one up. It is the rare icebreaker that is actually about the work rather than around it.

Anu's Take

The demo night the week before gives you ten minutes and a room. This one gives you a long build block and no timer, which is where somebody actually sits down with your project and asks what you were stuck on. New Work is an honest name for the night after you have shown the old one.

Anu's Take

Side by side asks a lot less of you than face to face, which is the whole trick of putting a meetup on a footpath. Toast has been running these here since 2024. Clover Point is where this town flies its kites, so there will be wind and there will be the Olympics across the water.

Anu's Take

The best restaurant recommendation is the one that ends in a booking, and #food has finally made one. Korean BBQ is the right call for this crowd, because the grill is on your table and the meal becomes a group project rather than a spectator sport. If you have been reading the channel for two years and never posting, this is the low-effort way in.

Anu's Take

Jonathan's checkers program did not just take the world title and a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, it went on to solve the game outright: perfect play is a draw, and that is that. Games have been AI's proving ground ever since, from Chinook to the chatbots writing everyone's emails, with a detour through Halo, whose AI sidekick Cortana later turned up on Microsoft's payroll. A lunch hour with the rare person who actually reached the end of a game, back to explain why the field keeps starting new ones.

Anu's Take

Show Your Work is the one format where you have to answer for what you actually built, so I'm looking forward to it. What I'll be showing is still to be determined. Be there or be square.

Anu's Take

Best room in town for old development languages and terminal clients, and I do not mean that as nostalgia. The people who learned on those tools ask different questions, and this is one of the few weeknights where nobody hurries them to the point. Current projects still get the table, the tangents are just older than average.

Anu's Take

This one's going to be epic. I was at last year's, about 60 people showed, and the winner, Calum Bird, built an app that connected to his bank account and an SMS service to track his spending and text him a burn whenever he made a bad call. The poorer the spending decision, the bigger the burn. It was brilliant.

Anu's Take

"Some food and drinks" is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. Superteam Canada is Solana's Canadian chapter, it hands out grants and runs a pre-accelerator, and there is a Solana prize track sitting on Codechella's agenda the next morning. It is not billed as a scouting night, but Friday before a hackathon usually is one.

Anu's Take

Founder Friday Walks: three August Fridays up PKOLS for women business owners, built by Kaila Pilecki and Nicole Crone. Business talk on the trail. If this is for you, passing it on.

Anu's Take

So sad I can't attend this one, because Calum Bird and Daniel Kopaee are both rockstars. Ontology basics beside LLM security is a sharper pairing than it looks: one is about naming things precisely enough for a machine to use them, the other about what happens to what you hand it. It is also always great to spend time with Geoff Shera at Frontier.

Anu's Take

Every stakeholder alignment exercise I have been part of produced a wall of sticky notes and a promise to synthesize them later. Later is usually never. Here the synthesis happens in the room, in seconds, and the humans keep the judgement calls. That is the version of AI I can get behind.

Anu's Take

The Vancouver Microsoft 365 crowd has set aside two hours to just talk to each other before September's summit, which is a rarer format than it sounds. The tell is buried in the logistics: someone waits in the lobby to take you up to the 14th floor. Plenty of groups call themselves welcoming and then leave you guessing which elevator. If the Microsoft stack pays your bills, this is the room where you find out who else in the city is solving the same problems.

Anu's Take

The quietest line in this agenda is 'responsible, accurate corrections', which is the polite way of saying the numbers get changed after they are collected. Everybody does it. Almost nobody has a process that holds up when someone asks about it a year later, and that is the gap worth two hours.

Anu's Take

All levels, all stacks, one long table. If you've been meaning to start something and keep not starting it, this is a low-stakes place to type line one.

Anu's Take

Work In Progress is a status rather than a topic, and naming a night after it takes the pressure off. Nobody is expected to arrive with a result. Momentum counts, which is a lower bar than finished and a considerably higher one than interested.

Anu's Take

Saturday. Will there be fireworks?

Anu's Take

Fifty-seven graduates, twenty-two projects, and complimentary burgers and hot dogs on the patio. If you're hiring juniors, four hours here beats four weeks of resumes, and nobody has learned to call a group project "cross-functional delivery leadership" yet. The timelines are still refreshingly optimistic, which is honestly the part I'd hire for. I'll be there.

Anu's Take

Passing this one on. Kaila Pilecki and Nicole Crone built Founder Friday Walks for women business owners: three Friday mornings in August, hiking PKOLS, with the business talk happening on the way up.

Anu's Take

If there is a leadership decision you have been carrying around for a year, this is the room for it. July opened the floor and nearly every problem turned out to be a people problem, so August goes one level up, to the talent on the leadership team itself. The format opens with a report back on whether last month's advice worked or got quietly ignored, which is more accountability than most peer groups ask for. No recordings, no notetakers, no broadcasting, which in 2026 is the whole reason anyone says the real thing.

Anu's Take

Worth the early alarm, as long as you check the channel before you set it. I turned up for the first Friday, learned the date had moved the night before, and had a quiet coffee for my trouble. A breakfast that lives in Slack has no event page to correct you, which is the charm and the catch at once. Pancakes deferred, not cancelled.

Anu's Take

Rooftop patio, patio, patio.

Anu's Take

AI turned up in classrooms a good while before anyone wrote the rules for it, which is roughly how these things always go. This session steps back from the panic to ask what it actually means for students, parents, and the people who will eventually be hiring them. A lunch spent on a genuinely hard question, which beats another one spent pretending it isn't one.

Anu's Take

The last one sold me. Great spot, great group, and the room runs from fresh grads to post-retirement, with the talk landing anywhere between AI-assisted coding, punch cards and ham radio operators. If that sounds like fun, this is the place to be. Wednesday is burger and beer night at the pub, as well.

Anu's Take

Peak summer, and the code crowd still turns up to a billiards hall on a weeknight. Says something about this group, or about nobody's ability to leave a side project alone.

Anu's Take

Worth the Tuesday for the title alone, which is an instruction rather than a topic. Most build nights quietly want the finished thing; this one asks for the part that is still stuck. Harder to walk in with, more useful to leave with.

Anu's Take

iWIST's summer celebration for the Island's women in STEM, with three student scholarships handed out on the night. Passing it along.