THIS WEEK IN TECTORIA

A community blog celebrating Victoria's booming tech sector

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Got a cool story about technology and creativity in Victoria? Email stories, tips, pictures, links and anything of interest to Tessa Bousfield at: tectoria@viatec.ca

Archives for January 2015

Winner of Giant Jenga Tournament Wins Trip for Two to a Canucks Game!

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How are your Jenga skills?

If you think you’re so hot then why not enter our Giant Jenga Tournament on Friday, January 16 at Fort Tectoria (it’s part of our VIATeC Member’s Only New Year’s Party) and win a trip for two to Vancouver? The tournament entry fee of five dollars will be donated to the Mustard Seed Food Bank.

Go to a Canucks hockey game on Flight Centre Victoria.

The grand prize of the tournament? One package for two people that includes:

  • Flight
  • Hotel
  • Two tickets to a Canucks game (of your choice)

But you’ll have to hurry – there are only a few tickets left for the VIATeC New Year’s Party.

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The Grand Prize is sponsored Flight Centre Victoria:

Note: this party is for VIATeC members only.

How to win?

At the VIATeC Member New Year’s Party on January 16 we’re hosting a giant Jenga tournment.

It’s a King’s Court system; five dollar entry fee for every team. Teams can be one or two people (maximum). Every penny of every entry fee will go to the Mustard Seed Food Bank.

Registration is first-come, first-serve.

Registration at the front door to get into the party (only a few tickets left). If you want to enter the Jenga tournament that will be a separate registration inside.

There will be four separate Jenga stations.

The first person to arrive will be the king of that particular Jenga court. The next people arriving (who have paid five dollars) can challenge the king of that tower.

Matches will be four minutes, timed.

The first person to knock the tower over loses. If the tower has not fallen, we will be keeping track of each team’s time using a chess timer. The team who has used the least amount of time after the four minutes wins.

The winner advances for free (they stay at the court), and the loser is eliminated. We will keep track of every team’s wins.

If you want to play again you can pay $5.

If you want to play again you can pay $5, get in line, and challenge another team (you can challenge any four of the stations). If you lose, pay another $5 to play.

The tournament will continue for one hour. The team that has the most wins at each station will enter a playoff using the same rules.

The two winning teams of this second round will play together in a championship match with no time limit.

The team that wins this final championship match wins the Vancouver package.

 

Chris Campbell

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Our Tectorian of the Week is Chris Campbell.

Why Chris? It’s because we think he represents the latent technical talent, creativity, spirit, hard work and dedication to building community that makes Tectoria what it is.

First, a bit of Chris Campbell’s backstory:

Chris Campbell is a Mercurial Communications alumnus that worked in Victoria on a high-profile web browser project that eventually transformed into Flock, the world’s first social browser. As senior software engineer with that project, Campbell moved with Flock to San Francisco (and being sure to stay firmly connected with his home town) when the highly sought-after Victoria team was recruited by Zynga.

Zynga, a game company, needed the know-how of this skilled Victoria software team to build the complicated backend tools that powered its business.

Over the course of time, a couple of the Victoria peeps who worked at Zynga in San Francisco got jobs at Change.org.

One thing led to another, and five Zynga employees in Victoria plus one in San Francisco (who was moving back to Canada) accepted offers to start on just this past August.

There were six Change.org local employees when the Victoria office opened, and the since then three more Victoria employees.

And, true to form for a Victoria tech company, a UVic student will be starting a co-op term in January.

So that’s the backstory.

But the long and short of it is that Chris Campbell proves that Tectorians have wicked chops when it comes to designing and building software or just about any other technical product. Chris competes (and works with) the best in the business. And on the planet.

On top of that, Chris is a true Tectorian because he remains connected to and supports his home, Victoria. Chris could live anywhere, really, but he always chooses to come back to Tectoria.

He is able to put his amazing skills and mad passion to use by putting Victoria on the map. So we can nurture and attract more Chris Campbells and more Tectorians.