Blog.Denisen.Net

Last week I attended the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference. It’s held annually in Montreal, and the official purpose is to gather the brightest student minds in Canada and inspire and educate them via speeches and presentations given by brightest minds in the industry and academy. The unofficial purpose of CUSEC is for a bunch of people from various universities to get together and get drunk. For me, one of the motivating reasons of going there was seeing Montreal, as I’ve never been to Quebec before.

The conference has been held for several years, and the last one turned out to be the biggest one yet (when isn’t it?). The conference highlights included:

• Zed Shaw’s talk (personally, I never heard about him before, but he was really, really good. Everybody except my friend loved him)
• Jeff Atwood’s talk, who quoted someone saying “Canadian cities look the way American cities do on television” (true because a large chunk of American movies and TV series are shot up north across the border)
• Tim Bray’s keynote
• Erlang and concurrent programming in general
• Job fair that I didn’t really attend
• Formal dinner banquet with restaurant staff so incompetent they forgot to charge me for wine

There were other speakers and other topics covered as well, but I didn’t find them as notable / important / attention-grabbing.

During the little free time that I had available inbetween talks and organized events, I managed to get out of the conference centre and walk around Montreal. The old part is really quite nice and looks almost European. I’m still in the process of editing and uploading pictures (damn school work). For English-only speakers, being in Montreal is kind of like being in a dubbed movie: the majority of signs are in French only, but everybody (at least in the downtown area) can speak English.

Just before arriving in the city we were warned about the bad fame of Montreal drivers. The warning turned out to be true, as every time I went outside, I witnessed a near-collision or actual collision (one happened right outside the hotel we were staying at as I was heading out for dinner).