Tech community events in Greater Victoria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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.

Anu's Take

On paper this is a low-key Saturday in a City community room, free snacks, no experience required, which rather undersells it. It is the Island's doorway into a global contest that drew over eight hundred projects last year and pays the winner six figures. The snacks are real, but so is the leaderboard.

Anu's Take

Worth knowing about, and very hard to find out about. The only public trace is a recurring entry on the YYJ Tech calendar created back in 2017, with an RSVP link pointing at a Meetup group that went quiet in 2022. The event is still going regardless. The pub, at least, is easy to find.

Anu's Take

Bring a problem, not a plan. Nobody minds if you spend the whole night stuck on one bug, which is more grace than most Tuesdays offer.

Anu's Take

There is something appealing about a night whose centrepiece is ninety minutes of nobody presenting. Just people building next to each other, with demos and feedback to close it out. "Back to the lab" is a good note to end an invitation on.

Anu's Take

Every industry says it wants community. Toast went and built one: women in tech, by women in tech, meeting in person. If this is for you, passing it on.

Anu's Take

The one I look forward to every month. The range of what people bring, and the thinking behind it, is worth the evening on its own. It's a crowd pleaser, and the turnout of non-regulars says so.

Anu's Take

Tuesday, laptop, pool hall. The format hasn't changed in years, which is exactly why it still works. Intros at 6:15 if you want to know who else showed up.

Anu's Take

Two short talks at UVic: Glen Pierce on building judgement, and Nick Hepner on why the tech community is worth showing up for, which apparently still needs saying out loud. I'll be there for the community part. Technology changes. People are still the point.

Anu's Take

First-time visitor, long-time watcher. I've been showing up to OpenHack Victoria for a while, and I've been meaning to make the run up to Duncan for the Cowichan edition. Weather's good, so this one's a two-wheel trip. Shiny side up.

Anu's Take

Best chicken fingers in town are here, at least so far. Let me know if you find something better.

Anu's Take

A hundred and ten editions in, and the invitation is refreshingly blunt: show up building something, or this one isn't for you. There's a quiet confidence in a Tuesday co-working night that's willing to turn browsers away. "The Next Order" is a grand name for a room of people shipping side projects after work, and that gap between the billing and the reality is most of the charm.

Anu's Take

I'm working on something. Building in public is hard.

Anu's Take

Still the best place in town if you want to get deep into the weeds of coding languages and related software from days gone by.

Anu's Take

Time to get out and play. A ballgame with the whole tech community is about as easy as networking gets, and exactly my kind of low-effort night out.

Anu's Take

Always a good midweek reason to bring the laptop out. There's usually a conversation or two worth having.

Anu's Take

Finally! I can make it. Said no one for 07:30 breakfast meeting!

Anu's Take

I might actually have something to show off this week. Be there or be square.

Anu's Take

This is the post mini-con afterparty. VDS seems to be having lots of these, conferences I mean.

Anu's Take

Post Microsoft Build Day 1, there might be a conversation or two.

Anu's Take

Beer, craft beer, beer, and a view.

Anu's Take

Continuing the long weekend relaxation with a little more chill and code. Just not at home and not at the office.

Anu's Take

Number 100! Wow. Sold-out during Web Summit? Wow, Wow!

Anu's Take

1 more to a 100. Will they make it?

Anu's Take

Good old OG fun. And they meet Wednesday's in the Cowichan Valley. Come and talk to myself or Shane about the VIATEC Software Leadership Roundtable. You may just be able to your eyeballs on a Framework laptop at this event.

Anu's Take

Cursor. One of the top new agentic coding tools to help you get more done in less. Cursor is probably the best all around agentic enabled coding tool. Based on VS Code.

Anu's Take

Good old OG fun. And they meet Wednesday's in the Cowichan Valley. Come and talk to myself or Shane about the VIATEC Software Leadership Roundtable.

Anu's Take

Not to be missed. Get out and support!

Anu's Take

I'm looking forward to this engineering and then a movie.

Anu's Take

The OG Victoria tech community is at it again. Happy to collaborate with the via VDS on the most recent mentorship program.

Anu's Take

I also get to accept the Malahat Skywalk tickets I won earlier this month. Yeeha!

Anu's Take

Always moving and at Frontier this week. Been a couple weeks since I chilled with this group. Looking forward to catching up.

Anu's Take

I got the scoop. VTN26 is officially kicked-off. Tech, Sports, Hackathon. What more could one ask for.

Anu's Take

Always a good one, eh!

Anu's Take

Where local builders go to build, and I'm not talking about construction. Although that industry is definitely mentioned.

Anu's Take

Sponsored by Trelent

Anu's Take

This is the Victoria OG hang and code group. I'm looking to dive into Claude Code or Clawdbot