mock

http://www.viatec.ca/job-board/11521

Works just fine with version 1.x files

http://www.simonmorden.com/books/equations-of-life/ includes an excerpt from the first book.

I'd definitely be interested in some sort of meetup, if such a thing were going to happen...

Also, don't get me started on local angels (both Victoria and Vancouver)... :-(

I've been making noises about organizing some other developer focused thing to make up for how crap viatec is... need to find sufficiently round tuits first.

As for health startups, it has at least one that I know about (and I'm not talking about genologics).

Victoria is definitely doing more tech-wise that Campbell River or Courtenay, in that there are more tech companies, more startups, and more tech jobs. As with anywhere outside of a major hub, you're going to have to do a lot of leg work to find those jobs - and to find ones that pay well.

On the other hand, if you're a high level/senior marketing, sales, or developer, there are opportunities at more reasonable pay levels - assuming you can find a position (it is after all, a relatively small community, and senior spots don't crop up all that often). One of the primary annoyances is that http://www.viatec.ca/ (the local tech community group) is kinda worthless for finding work - or for that matter, for finding talent when you're hiring. My experience is that hiring tends to be by word of mouth or via recruiter. Two of my last three Victoria jobs have been through recruiters, one was through word of mouth, all were reasonably well paid (at least as well as I did in Vancouver). There are strangely a fair number of startups, mostly in the mobile advertising and sem/seo space - and all the regular caveats about working for startups and startup wages apply as they do anywhere else.

Since I'm a developer, I mostly keep an eye on who's hiring in that space. Amongst non-startups, you might try perforce (I know they were looking for a front end guy, they might not be any more), neverblue (definitely looking to hire a couple of intermediate devs, probably a front end person too if the right one came along), and abe books.

Hope that helps.

Wages aren't exactly the greatest, expenses aren't exactly the lowest - and there's a real lack of depth in both talent and places to work. On the other hand, there are plenty of people doing start ups because they don't want to leave - you just have to know where to look.

(also, sent you an email)

We are a full-service advertising brokerage that specializes in online customer acquisition and lead generation. We deliver millions of profitable customers to clients from all over the world, including members of the Fortune 1000™.

We’re looking for developers (We have a fulltime position as well as contract work) and a QA person to work on-site in our Victoria office on our advertising, mobile, and tracking platforms. We use a fairly heterogeneous stack: Mostly PHP and Python on the server and the usual suspects on mobile - with zeromq, rabbitmq, postgres, couchdb, and whatever-gets-the-job-done. We expect you to have a solid background with at least one dynamic language (PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby) and some experience with the usual grab bag of web/database technologies.

You can apply on our website http://www.neverblue.com/welcome/about-neverblue/careers email [email protected] or talk to me directly at [email protected] if you need more details.

I see your point about talent though. There are quite a few really good perl programmers, and a lot of "I once wrote a script in that" types, but not many in the middle. In some ways this is a strength - if you're programming in perl these days, odds are you've stuck with it because you actually like the language, so you're probably pretty good at it. On the other hand, it's not taught in school, so unless folks learn it on their own or on the job, there might be a real lack of new talent coming up the ranks.

As a programmer for hire, I can't complain about the wages. As an entrepreneur, I know where to find the good people, so it's not really a problem for me.

(I would also point out that any good programmer or intern/recent college grad who wishes to become a good programmer should always be willing to learn a new language on the company's tab. If they aren't, that probably says more about them than the language).

The entire Regexp::Common namespace is basically a cookbook of the "right" way to use regular expressions. Worth stealing and porting to other languages...

And this is great news, as it will make pitching those investors easier.

Previous startups I have worked for in Canada have all gone south of the border to raise either VC or Angel funding, so I suspect that this problem is somewhat over hyped. That said, everyone likes to remove friction (and accounting/legal costs) from raising money, so the change in law is a good thing.

As another aside, a Canadian company can multiply investment (certainly at the level of Angel investment) by as much as three times thanks to various Canadian R&D programs (IRAP and SRED), and Canadian investors usually qualify for the lifetime capital gains exemption, which can make an exit even more appealing (who doesn't love a tax break?). So there are some good reasons to invest up here.