CUSEC 2009
That was a little more than a week ago. I was going to do a daily reflection while I was there, but there was some ridiculous wireless limitations. That is, 100MB/24 hours was to be shared between four occupants in a room. Except… one IP address is registered for a room for 24 hours. Translation: only one person could get on the network, and once they’re on, they’re staying on. Although this is a software engineering conference we’re talking about. Most of us are computer geeks, and you know you’re a geek when you bring a router to the hotel, and try to hack nearby networks. (Un)fortunately, I wasn’t one of them so I was stranded with minimal Internet access.
Social Highlights
- The best animal to be is the Panda. “It’s black, white and Chinese.” The chameleon, however, is just a poser.
- I spent the first night at the conference Pub Night. Aside from trying to make small with some of the more socially awkward engineers, we got serenaded by Joey deVilla, the tech evangelist for Microsoft. He sang Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time” to his accordion. It was damn awesome.
- The other nights I spent playing Big Two with five other people and two decks of cards. The extra layer of strategy is that every time you pass, you have to pick up a card. Going at 5 cents a card, I lost $5.15 in 6 hours over 2 nights which is cheaper than a lot of entertainment that we could have had. Plus, I had a lot of fun with the music playing in the background and with drinks on the floor.
- We had some really nice food. The crepes were so much better in Montreal than in Toronto. On the last night, we ate at Ruben’s. I swear people would kill for their cakes, or at least get very sick over because if heaven had a taste, this would be it. (Which is what will happen if you try to eat 3 giant slices.)
- One of my FLC students came to CUSEC. I’m so incredibly thrilled that they are taking an interest in activities outside of classes, and finding their place university.
Conference Highlights
- The first talk was given by Leah Culver, one of the founders of Pownce, now own by Six Apart. Although I didn’t think the talk was especially powerful in that it didn’t send shivers down my spine, I felt that it was the most personal talk. It was something that I could relate to, and it makes me feel that I could do what’s she’s doing to. It was great to open the conference with her.
- The day ended with a demo of the Lively Kernel by Dan Ingalls. Everything that can do with JavaScript is there, including the ability to invent an instrument and turn back time. The graphics were very elementary, but man was I impressed by the spinning.
- One of the keynote presentations of Day 2 was given by Avi Bryant of Dabble DB. “Bad Hackers Copy, Great Hackers Steal.” What was really interesting about this talk is that this idea of stealing is recurring advice. When I read the title in the in the schedule, the first thing that came into my mind was Cameron Moll’s “Good designers copy, great designers steal” article. Even some of my favourite artists “steal”. Mind you, this does not mean go out, take someone else’s hard work and try to pass it off as your own.
- The research and the ideas are out there as are all the tools you’ll never need. It’s up to you to find them, implement them, and give them life. It’s a whole talk about Research and Development, which I studied brief in Economics and Law. Research in itself has little market value because the innovation itself simply isn’t useful until development comes along and transform it into an application that consumers find useful.
- Giles Bowkett’s talk was about his Archaeopteryx project where you’re taking user input to produce a matrix which produces sound, and how this can come into play in the DJ scene. He had this Venn diagram explanation the intersection between parties, awesome, cool people and the mutually exclusive laptop. “Dude this party is going to be awesome, I’ll bring my laptop.”
- The talk was followed by Joey DeVilla who gave his story about how he established his career and came to play the accordion. What a fun guy. And while Bowkett gave his presentation, Joey went and edited his slides to include the intersection of the cool guy, parties, awesome and the accordion. And he sang for us again! “When I say ‘Linux’, the ‘GNU’ is silent”
- The last keynote speaker of the conference was Francis Hwang, a writer, an artist and a software engineer. Basing his presentation off the story of the blind men and the elephant, he commented on how we always compare software engineering to other disciplines like math, economics and art. But software engineering is software engineering. We should draw inspiration from other places and bring them into the field. Because it’s so diverse, it doesn’t matter what you’re interested in, chances are, there is a place for it.
The theme of the conference was software (r)evolutions, but everyone did their own thing. Despite that, it was obvious that everyone was passionate about what they were doing. And the take home message is: Do what you love!
