Saigon Mobile DevCamp

After a few months of prep work , the team for Saigon Mobile DevCamp has gone public with the event! The DevCamp will be a barcamp style event, with a lot of pros and amateurs from the Vietnamese Development community contributing workshops and leading a group of 100 devs through a weekend long coding competition, with prizes.

Paul, as usual, is discussing the rarefied world of founder/coders; while I love these guys, it’s not actually that great a description of the customers we work with, who tend to be exceptionally savvy in areas that aren’t software. Still, the idea is the same: spend the absolute minimum to build a real, working product and get as quickly as possible to ’sustainable’.

Of course, the whole article (including recipes) is worth reading but here’s the section that resonated the most with me:

A startup that reaches ramen profitability may now be more likely to succeed than not. Which is pretty exciting, considering the bimodal distribution of outcomes in startups: you either fail or make a lot of money.

While I would love it to be true that 50% of ramen profitable companies will “succeed,” I do agree that if your company can achieve any kind of real cashflow profitability, you’ve passed a huge hurdle and your chances of success are hugely better than average…not only because the business is proven to be working, but because you’re now giving yourself several different types of success to choose from.

And isn’t freedom to choose one of the real reasons we’re in this entrepreneurial game, to begin with?

This past Saturday, 25 designers and developers got together at the Tech Propulsion Labs Tân Bình office to hear talks from top-notch Vietnamese designers:

• Min Trần – @mintran (Frexy Studios and Icon Eden) – Writing beautiful HTML
• Lê Tùng Lâm – @letunglam (HR2B) – SEO for Web Designers
• Đức Ban – @ducban (ASALEO J.S.C.) – From Typography To CSS Framework

The later part of the day was spent sharing experiences: Min Trần led a discussion of being a freelance Web Designer, while Tech Propulsion Labs CTO Dan Shupp @dshupp – finished the day with a session on working with and closing foreign clients.

So, where to now?

Nguyễn Anh Hùng (@anhhung), a Tech Propulsion Labs Project Manager, concluded the event by mapping out the future of Webcamp Saigon. The day’s attendees decided:

• Webcamp Saigon will have a dedicated Website for the community. The main focus of the Website is to reach out to more people, especially those who’re working with Web technologies. Founding members, those who attended the first event, will contribute articles to our blog, and we’re ambitious enough to build it into a top resource for Vietnamese Web Heads.
• As Barcamp Saigon 2 is nearing (preparations are underway), we ‘d like to hold the next Webcamp Saigon two or three months after that. Our goal is to have as many offline events as possible because we know face-to-face communication always works better :-)
• The next event will discuss not only Web Design topics but also Web Development. TPL is already on the hook to contribute sessions on working through Design and Development simultaneously using Agile Software practices, as well as implementing design using Javascript frameworks and Ruby on Rails.

So, we’re obviously looking forward to seeing the Vietnamese Web Design & Dev community grow: we’re really looking forward to the next Barcamp Saigon, Webcamp Saigon 2, and other events in the works. We welcome all new participants, too: for now, please join our mailing list on Google, or the Facebook Group. You can also keep up to date with future Webcamp Saigon discussions on twitter and elsewhere with hashtag #webcampsaigon

Tech Propulsion Labs is happy to announce the first Webcamp Saigon on this Saturday, May 23rd 2009! This first Webcamp event will be a workshop focusing on web standards. Attendance is limited to the first 30 designers who want to join.

Update: Attendance is now closed for the first Webcamp workshop. Organizers are working on some creative ideas to get more people involved through slideshare and twitter, we’ll see what we can do to involve the many people who wanted to come but couldn’t.

What: Webcamp Saigon is a series of events specifically organized for Web Designers & Front-end Developers in the southern part of Vietnam. It is part workshop, part networking, and part geeking out about design. Current plans are to have quarterly events, sponsor design competitions, and anything else we can do to build communities of sharing, thinking designers in Vietnam

Who: The first event is a workshop by and for Web Designers, though we try to make room for fans of Web technologies, too :)

Why: The webcamp series aims to facilitate discussions and knowledge sharing among those who work on Web design and development, with a focus on Web Standards, Quality, and making the Vietnamese web beautiful and functional.

Where: Tech Propulsion Labs will provide a venue for the event, as well as take care of all the logistics involved. The address is at H17 (No. 64) A4 Street, Ward 12, Tân Bình District, HCMC. map to the Tech Propulsion Labs offices.

Sponsors: Together with Tech Propulsion Labs, ASALEO JSC and Frexy are sponsoring Webcamp Saigon.

Media, sponsorship or attendance inquiries related to Webcamp Saigon, should go to contact TPL. If you want to keep updated on the Webcamp series, join our Facebook Group: Webcamp Saigon

For more info, one of Tech Propulsion Labs’s Project Managers, Nguyen Anh Hung, blogged about the unconference at Fresco 2.0, or you can check the unconference’s site.