CUSEC 2010

I didn't really take any interesting pictures, so I am shamelessly displaying my nametag.

On Sunday I got back from a conference called CUSEC (Canadian Undergraduate Software Engineering Conference), held in Montreal. I was not very happy to come back home, as I had an amazing time and did not want it to end. I ate some bagels, spoke some pseudo-French, rode the subway, and met a lot of people, including the creator of MyTTC.ca (love that site). I also mingled with a bunch of students from other universities, which was cool.

There were a couple of great talks, but there were some that went over my head. One that I surprisingly enjoyed was about software security, and inspired me to read a book called The Art of Software Security Assessment (when summer rolls around). The only thing about the conference that at first confused/annoyed me and eventually made me to laugh was how everyone kept bringing up Ruby on Rails! I later learned that many of the speakers were active in the RoR community and were recruited this way.

Organizing the trip was somewhat of a headache, partly because things were so last minute. I was reading and writing emails about CUSEC constantly for two months and actually lost sleep worrying that I wouldn’t be able to recruit enough people from U of T to go. I also kept feeling like something was going to go horribly wrong during the trip, such as hotel room damage or losing people, and that I would be responsible. However, it all worked out just fine. I am happy that people enjoyed the conference but I wouldn’t organize it again to be quite honest. In fact I don’t think I would organize anything ever again, haha. Now I have to catch up on 5 days of schoolwork!

* an article I wrote for the DCS newsletter

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