The future of Singapore’s Geekdom

During a panel discussion on entrepreneurship organised by StartupRootsSG earlier this year, Shirley Wong from TNF Ventures said that “there are no hardcore developers in Singapore” at HackerSpaceSG.

Exactly one month later, the geeks responded. According to different estimates, GeekcampSG 2012, which happened on August 18, saw between 400 to 500 attendees, and is Singapore’s largest GeekcampSG yet.

Covering topics from security to continuous integration to graph databases, this year’s GeekcampSG saw various community leaders, including Michael Cheng, Calvin Cheng, and Subh come in and give talks on topics that they were passionate about. Not only that, this year’s GeekcampSG was the first time a group of younglings (a term coined to describe younger geeks) were given a chance to present at the conference on things that they were playing around with, including Android development and development on Ruby on Rails.

With around 20 percent of the attendees being students, the future sure looks bright for Singapore’s tech ecosystem.

So, what did this year’s GeekcampSG have to show about the future of the tech ecosystem in Singapore?

1. For all the talk of there being no hardcore developers in Singapore, it’s surprising how many of the talks centered around hardcore topics, such as security and graph databases.
2. Despite the huge craze in SoLoMo app startups around, many of Singapore’s geeks still seem to be interested in some of the more hardcore tech, as can be seen from the high number of votes talks like “Hardware is not BORING” and “Continuous Integration for PHP with Jenkins & Sonar” recieved.
3. Younger geeks are joining the community. This year’s push for younglings seemed to work, and got more younger geeks to play a role in the community. And it seems that these younglings still have the curiousity in them and the drive to pick up new technologies.
4. With more people joining GeekcampSG this year than the last, it would seem that the community in Singapore is growing rapidly, and with more geeks in the local ecosystem sharing knowledge, it certain bodes well for the tech industry in Singapore.

If you missed out on this year’s GeekcampSG, find them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter at @geekcamp to ensure that you are alerted to the tickets when it’s out. Slides from this year’s talks (and in a couple of weeks, videos) can be found on the GeekcampSG website.

The organizers would also like to take this opportunity to thank Windows Azure (where a free three months trial is available), iDA, Softlayer (startups can use the coupon code: SNGCLOUD01), and Paypal for their support.