This past Thursday-Friday I had the pleasure of participating in CUSEC, the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference in Montréal. I organized the Queen’s delegation and am very impressed with not only the speakers but also the impressive degree of transparency in the planning and execution of the conference and my peers at the other universities.

The keynote speakers were:

Their keynotes were all recorded and will be posted to the CUSEC website at some point in the future (which, I think is great, because that means I can catch the first half of Tim Bray’s keynote which we missed because of arriving a bit late). I definitely picked up on a lot of tidbits from different presentations. Here are some highlights:

  • I gained a real appreciation for just how elegant an approach functional programming (e.g. Haskell, etc.) is for handling massive concurrency. Apparently at other universities students aren’t taught it until 4th year and even at ours the emphasis for learning it was much more academic (the approach thinking about programming in different ways helps you even if you don’t touch the language again) than practical.
  • I met one of the three people who wrote the Interac system. Thousands of transactions a second a billions of dollars go through that system which hasn’t needed to be modified since it was created.
  • I got to tour the EA Games Studio in Montréal and a free copy of Madden ‘08 from them by being the 17th person to show up on the second day of the conference.
  • There’s a real opportunity to talk to the speakers before and after their presentations; not just a question and answer period; but, the opportunity to have a one-on-one conversation. I especially liked how many of them went out to the other conference events like the banquet and pub night.
  • Finally the implications of the semantic web and the terminology around it became clear.
  • I had an opportunity to meet and talk with Tim Bray in person, whose writing I’ve been following for a while.
  • Meeting people from the other schools was very interesting; it turns out that we have a lot of the same challenges.
  • There were a lot of Linux users; this wasn’t unexpected, but, is none-the-less cool especially seeing the degree to which some people have automated their daily tasks and the techniques they used to do so.
  • I saw an XO laptop in person, that was neat.
  • I learned about some very different approaches to writing some specific types of software than I usually use which seem to have a significant learning curve but tremendous benefits (Ragel for creating parsers).
  • There were plenty of recruitment opportunities; which,isn’t what I was looking for in the immediate future; but, making connections now for later is beneficial.
  • A lot of the speakers were very inspirational, especially once they revealed how small the teams that completed some massive projects really were.

It was a great experience and I really encourage you to attend in the future, if you can. Your university may not be like Concordia (where some of the Computer Science lectures are canceled so that people can go to CUSEC instead); but, it’s definitely more than worth the financial cost and the time to catch up on school work after.