Home » Blog » How I came to put together this guide

How I came to put together this guide

To give some context for this guide, I thought I’d give a summary of my story, which is really the story behind this guide.

My education is in Computer Engineering at UBC back in the 80’s and 90’s. I then spent most of the next 20 years working at MacDonald Dettwiler (MDA) in Richmond. At MDA I did lots of different things. We built some pretty amazing systems, everything from weather radar systems to a whole satellite mission (RADARSAT-2). For most of my time there I was involved with satellite ground segments which are essentially very large, semi-custom, software systems that cover the whole range from user ordering, to satellite control, to handling huge volumes of satellite imagery data.

About 4 years ago, I made the decision to leave MDA and move into the world of smaller tech businesses. As part of this transition I had to learn about the state of the local tech industry. I had been with a big company for so long that I had lost track of what was going on my my own city. While at MDA, I had worked in satellite earth observation, and in that industry the customers and suppliers aren’t in Vancouver, they’re scattered across the globe.

It was a really interesting process to re-discover the Vancouver Tech community and and learn about the tech start-up scene. One of the ways that I did this was to make a few angel investments in a some local start-ups and angel funds. Getting involved in this kind of investing really forces you look at a lot of companies and learn about different industries and technologies. A great, but time consuming learning experience! I viewed this process as a portion of creating my own real-world MBA (a term I cribbed from Tim Ferriss’s description of angel investing as an MBA alternative).

Learn more effective benefits of Kamagra to overcome the ill-effects cialis tablets australia of excessive self-stimulation: Mast Mood oil is another such supplement which improves erectile dysfunction significantly. Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour online order viagra on others without getting a few drops on yourself.” – Og Mandino I love fragrances of all kinds but especially those erotic, woodsy, scents like the ones I have worn for years. You can tell your man to make lifestyle changes to boost viagra online without prescription male fertility naturally. So if you are suffering erection problems, it is cipla cialis generika important to find out the cause Know more about the ED as much as you can. In the process of exploring the Vancouver tech world I collected various links, lists, newsletter subscriptions, etc. that helped paint a picture of the tech industry landscape. So I decided to organize this stuff and put it out there in case someone else found the info useful. At first it was just a page on my own personal, and pathetic, web site. But I had a desire to learn a bit more about I could do with WordPress and so this became a good test project. I was also really trying to work on a bigger project at the time and this was a nice “procrastination” project. I have realized that if I’m trying to learn something about a technology, the most enjoyable way for me is to build something (for example like my craft beer tasting tour mapping tool www.routebeer.net that I used to trick myself into learning JavaScript and responsive sites).

I realized that I won’t have the time to make frequent updates to this, so I avoided putting in any info that has a shorter lifespan than maybe a 6 to months. So no events listings, no calendars, no “who’s hiring now”, list of current start-ups, etc.

I’d be really happy if this helps some new graduates, entrepreneurs, investors, etc. get started in the Vancouver Tech Community.

Peter