This year is the biggest CUSEC yet, with more attendees than ever before. Things have been going really smoothly and there has been tons of positive feedback from delegates and speakers alike. Last night was our annual pub night, sponsored by 76design, and we brought out more people than ever to Montreal’s Brutopia pub. We quickly filled the top floor and had to encroach on the other two floors of the bar, with CUSEC goers in every nook and cranny.

I’ve been posting my pictures as quickly as I can on my flickr page, and tagging all of them with cusec2008. If any of you guys have pictures, please upload them and tag them with cusec2008! It’s much more fun to see pictures come online as the conference progresses.

76design is hosting CUSEC’s annual Pub Night!

On Thursday, January 17th at 9pm, come to the top floor of Montreal’s Brutopia brewpub and meet with other delegates, organizers and even speakers over a pint (or several) of delicious microbrewed beer. There will be games, activities and prizes! But you’ll have to have to show up to experience it! Hope to see you there!

Google Map of Brutopia

Have you ever taken a moment to think about the sculpters of your destiny? The ones who have chizzeled away at the rough shape of your thoughts, who gave sweat, tears, and blood to cut-away the chunks of rough and unfinished ideas that would have otherwise forever held you back?

Dr. Grogono is one of those sculpters; an artist whose teachings have landed us incredible jobs, brought to us tremendous opportunities, and sparked the passion for our craft.

It was but only but a few days after the fresh start of my software engineering program that a friend had mentioned Dr. Grogono. He had told me: ?Whatever you do, if you can take a class with this prof, take it! It doesn’t matter what the class is.? Two years later I did. My friend was more than right. Dr. Grogono was ?da bomb?. Along side his regular teachings in class, Dr. Grogono quoted authors such as Frederick P. Brooks Jr., Pete McBreen, and David Thomas in many ways, inviting us to continue our learning outside the classroom. I did.

Finally, Dr. Grogono is the spiritual father of the incredible adventure that has been, is, and will be: CUSEC! Dr. Grogono embarked on this adventure along with John Kopanas and a few other software engineering students at Concordia University many years ago. The years have passed and CUSEC continues to thrive and, yet again, the passion they have shared with us through this wonderful event will bring us together under one roof to celebrate our craft.

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Grogono as a CUSEC 2008 Keynote presenter on Friday morning at 11AM.

This post is about one of CUSEC 2008’s Keynote Speakers.

CUSEC will be honoured to have Dr. Jeffrey Ullman speak in Montreal. Most software engineering and computer science students will have a vague recognition of the name, at least. This recognition is usually because his name is often on the cover of our textbooks–those books that are considered the definitive works in our field.

Dr. Ullman is a Professor Emeritus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. There, he has distinguished himself as one of the thought leaders and best educators in the discipline. One of his notable and recent students actually dropped out: Sergey Brin.

In the corporate world, Dr. Ullman was at Bell Labs during its prime, served on Google’s technical advisory board, and is now the CEO of a software company.

In short, Dr. Ullman has a lot to teach us.

CUSEC will be holding it’s annual banquet on Friday, January 18, 2008 at 7:00pm at Weinstein and Gavino’s. This year’s banquet is sponsored by Radialpoint. The banquet is a formal event, which means suits and dresses. Speakers, sponsors, organizers and delegates will all be attending, so it’s a great way to socialize and interact with everyone. See you at dinner!

There is a legend about how Tim Bray is actually a self-sentient machine that runs on Turing-complete XML.

Is it true? I don?t know. Is he a walking wealth of knowledge on technological philosophy, UTF-8, understanding of the web being a massive stack of simple protocols that makes it awesome, that building projects from scratch is sub-optimal, and extracting the 10% that rocks from its current state as a sprawling organic mess is a good idea, that hitting the 80/20 point for a technological solution is the most important goal, or that being lazy and impatient are things to look for in solid programmers?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and more. Not only is he an old-hand awk/Perl/Python/Java/Ruby hacker, but this particular creator of XML and the Atom protocol and Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems has also been CEO of Waterloo Maple (makers of Maple), founder of Open Text Corporation (makers of one of the first web search engines), and Textuality (a web publishing consultancy).

Could Tim’s presence at CUSEC be any more relevant? Could this old gem from Sesame Street be any more awesome?

No, and no.

In searching for speakers, I looked for a few things in particular:

• Knows how to push thoughts from their own heads to others in a digestible/adhesive delivery method
• Cares about doing interesting, socially impacting things with computers
• Cares more about doing this ^^^ than the platform it happens on

Jon has these qualities in spades; accepting of the term “alpha-geek”, he was blogging before the term was coined, publicizing technological or cultural memes, while still tinkering on his own projects like the LibraryLookup Project.

Yet what really made me want to invite Jon was an interview in which he talked about how even though we’re at a stage where software dreams get implemented significantly faster than they used to, we still have a people problem:

we’re leaving a lot of folks behind. And I’m not just talking about the digital divide that separates the Internet haves from the have-nots. Even among the haves, the ideas and tools and methods that some of us take for granted haven’t really put down roots in the mainstream

This feeling is a core tenet of what I think CUSEC?s about; while our academic environments teach us a lot, it?s inevitable that they?re going to miss out on touching on certain ideas, bleeding-edge or not. By bringing in people like Jon, CUSEC continues to fill that gap.

Best blog from CUSEC 2007: http://skrud.net/articles/2007/01/20/cusec-2007. Best picture from CUSEC 2007: It’s a tie between http://www.flickr.com/photos/igorek/371086236/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/79215697@N00/380007070/

Skrud, Emily and Igor all get free tickets to CUSEC 2008!

Twenty lucky CUSEC attendees will get a tour of Electronic Arts‘ game development studio in Montreal. This tour will happen from 5:30pm to 6:15pm on Jan 18th, 2008. How can you get a tour? Be one of the first twenty people to sign up for it on Day 2 of CUSEC; sign-up begins at 8:30am. The sign-up sheet will be available at the Registration table. CUSEC thanks EA Montreal for providing us with this opportunity!

CUSEC 2008 is pleased to announce Radialpoint, Avanade, Microsoft and 76design as our newest sponsors. Radialpoint, Avanade and Microsoft will all have booths at CUSEC. Radialpoint will also be sponsoring the CUSEC 2008 Banquet (more info to come) and 76design will be sponsoring the CUSEC Pub Night.