Tech events in Greater Victoria this month

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Blue economy' normally turns up as a phrase inside a funding announcement. This is the version where it is eight named companies with their equipment in the water and the people who built it standing next to it. The first edition put 210 registrations on the same pier last October as part of an ocean-mapping conference, and moving it inside Tech Week should widen that a fair bit.

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 first panel's premise is the one that matters: circular materials do not fail on chemistry, they stall on everything around the product.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tickets are now available and I suspect they'll go fast. Get 'em while they're hot!

Anu's Take

The rule has already been tested. An AI called DABUS was named as inventor on filings in more than a dozen jurisdictions and refused by the USPTO, the EPO and a unanimous UK Supreme Court. The one grant, in South Africa, came from an office that checks the formalities and not the substance.

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 with no venue attached, which is either confidence or a to-do, and the arc is worth the hour regardless.

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

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

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

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.