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CUSEC 2006 and 2007 preperation begins

CUSEC | January 16, 2005 | 26 comments

As CUSEC 2005 comes to a close, we hope every one had a great time at the conference… and in room 907 ;-).

It is now time to look to the future. You can start by having your say (by commenting below) of what you want to see and do for CUSEC 2006, in Montreal, and CUSEC 2007, tentatively in Waterloo/Toronto. Who are some of the speakers you want to hear and meet? Are there any past speakers you want to come back? Are there any events you liked/disliked/would like to have?

A mailing list will be setup soon (detail to follow), but in the mean time email John Kopanas to be added to the list.

written by: Mark Pavlidis

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Comments

January 16, 2005 02:18 PM | John Kopanas commented:

These are some of the comments we got back from attendees.

Speakers they would like to see next year:

David Parnas, Stallman, Kent Beck, Bill Gates, Peter Grogono, Hal Helms

Topics/Themes Suggested:

Aspect Oriented Programming, User Interface, Usability, Networking People and Computers, Requirements.

Improvements Asked For:

1/2 Day Tour of City, Move Schedule Up

January 16, 2005 03:12 PM | Anonymous commented:

I’d like to have Steve McConnell and Tom DeMarco next year if possible.

January 16, 2005 04:33 PM | mcs commented:

possible themes: Engineering Software. The Web— were users and software meet more and more these days/the last big killer app for computers.

Speakers: Jakob Nielsen — http://www.useit.com/jakob/

Possible topics to look into: Why should you persue a p.eng? ethics—- privacy etc. One of the points from this year was that when you create a OS, there are hundreds of thousands of possible system configurations— if the OS makers can survey your hardware periodically, it would make testing easier for them— but this is crossing some privacy lines.

On Academia, should research be only in the university, should it be filtered down in to the high schools and cjeps? Researchers discovered math and science principles that are taught in high school—- a way to educate the user is to educate them when they are young (this is not a radical idea). more to come…

January 16, 2005 06:55 PM | mhp commented:

A requirements competition, where you have to extract and specify the requirements from an “actual client”.

From Alistair Cockburn: a extreme hour, which consists of 2 XP iterations.

January 16, 2005 07:16 PM | Mike Smith commented:

I like the idea of a requirements competition.

Steve McConnell, Martin Fowler, Alan Cox.

Oh yeah, Larry McVoy (BitKeeper guy) was interested in keynoting this year but couldn’t make it…

I’ll probably think of more later. Can’t believe it’s over, wow. And Chris is over in the next room already talking about hosting a first aid conference next year - some people never learn.

January 17, 2005 01:37 AM | Ahmed Kamel commented:

Mike Smith: “some people never learn”

More than you think my friend! (right John?)

January 17, 2005 05:38 PM | Michel "Kriggs" Parisien commented:

Some more speakers that I guess weren’t written down, but that were said:

• a return of Joel Spolsky

• Dave Thomas

• Guido van Rossum

and some of my own ideas:

• any of the gang of four

• Ron Jeffries

• these guys: http://agilemanifesto.org/

and despite what I’ve heard, it is good to have some people who have alternate views on things (ie. engineering extremism, lesser knowness, underground methodologies) because they can be good, and if not, at least they keep you from feeling like CUSEC is giving you the answer to everything, and from hating the software community for not using these “famous people’s” views on things. If you know what I mean.

Also, I was hashing this idea over: so long as CUSEC is pretty much Ontario, Quebec, and surrounding areas (ie. no one is flying in), why not have it be two weekends (Sat-Sun two weeks in a row). That way, you get an extra day, and you don’t miss class. This might not be a solution, but maybe me saying this will give someone else a better idea.

January 17, 2005 05:43 PM | Michel "Kriggs" Parisien commented:

Also, live web feed! With or without a password, depending on whether or not you care that people aren’t paying their $55.

Also, look for people from big projects, especially open-source projects like Apache and such.

January 18, 2005 05:41 PM | Mike Smith commented:

A few more suggestions:

Either Dave Thomas (the Ottawa guy who I think founded OTI, or the Pragmatic Programmer).

Try to record the presentations and give them out on CD at the end, especially for concurrent events.

Give out t-shirts in the gift bag. I still wear my 2003 shirt (especially when I am working with roof tar :)

Try to get everybody into one hotel/hostel again. Also since it’s Montreal you can give everybody a list of 2 or 3 bars, “try to meet up here in a few hours”.

Oh yeah. CUSECpubcrawl?

January 18, 2005 08:55 PM | jfc commented:

Dave Thomas ++ Steve McConnell ++ Tom DeMarco ++ Martin Fowler ++

January 19, 2005 02:27 PM | John Kopanas commented:

Keep all the great feedback coming.

The organizers for CUSEC 2006 are taking all of your suggestions very seriously.

Thank you for all your help.

January 19, 2005 06:19 PM | Su-Lin commented:

”..so long as CUSEC is pretty much Ontario, Quebec, and surrounding areas (ie. no one is flying in), why not have it be two weekends (Sat-Sun two weeks in a row). That way, you get an extra day, and you don’t miss class.”

This year I know people from Waterloo flew in to Ottawa and the rest of us drove/Greyhounded, so it’ll be even harder to drive/fly to Montreal next year for 2 weekends to attend.

January 19, 2005 06:19 PM | Michel Parisien commented:

John: I want to somehow be involved in this one, because I’d really like to know what goes into this kind of thing. Is there a way for me to be listening in or participating or something?

(My e-mail: protose@kriggs.ca)

January 20, 2005 12:54 PM | John Kopanas commented:

I look back to my schooling and I don’t remember ever being afraid to miss a day or two of classes. Maybe I am in the minority.

Does everyone feel like missing a couple days of class is a major problem at the beginning of the semester?

Historically we organized the conference Thursday through Saturday and I would even consider adding another 1/2 day or something.

January 20, 2005 01:17 PM | mhp commented:

Kriggs, thank you for the suggestions. About having a 2 weekend event, I agree with John and other comments that it is not feasible for those who are not within city or an hour drive distance. You’d either have double the travel cost, or miss an entire week and incur extra lodging costs.

Personally I believe that the Thurday-Saturday model works well. Since Sunday is a travel day, then only one week is interrupted.

January 20, 2005 10:20 PM | Orlando Marquez commented:

How about a showcase of Open Source Projects. I am sure it wouldn’t be too difficult to track people wh o work in projects such as the Struts Framework or Tomcat. Since joining an open source project is a way to see how real software is created, it’d be a nice way to introduce attendees to this community and in the long run benefit from it. On a side note, what happened to the mailing list? And I think there is no major problem with missing 1 or 2 days at school.

January 21, 2005 02:09 PM | mhp commented:

A reminder that CUSEC is a Software Engineering conference, and not one about software development per say. The concerns of engineers are different from those of coders. There are many well designed FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) projects on the go, then again there are many (some popular) ones that are not (but one of the benefits of seeing the source it is not hard to find out)

That being said, having a project that is open source is not a sufficient condition for a well engineered software product. So a showcase of this type would be better suited at other types of conferences (i.e. OLS - http://www.linuxsymposium.org/) and such (comments John?)

For example, Firefox (with its plugings and themes) is an excellent example of following the principals of design for change, and information hidding. Some of the Apache Foundation projects have done this well also (i.e. SpamAssassin). Another is Eclipse.

Presonally, learning about the details to use some tool of the day, to code in some language of the day, has little (or no) value added.

January 21, 2005 05:49 PM | Orlando M commented:

I see your point and the reasons for stating it. I believe if I explain what I would like to see, perhaps we could find a better term than ‘showcase’.

Many of us would like to work on independent group projects, at school, during a work term, or during the summer, but do not really know what the process of creating and undertaking such project would be. Let’s assume the projects we are referring to are small. Some of us already have projects but maybe they feel like they are wasting a lot of their time and are not achieving a decent level of productivity.

What would be interesting here is to find out how is it that the Apache server (or any other project) was created, what approach was taken, what approach is being taken to maintain it?, etc. It is nice to hear about Agile methodologies from Alistair Cockburn, but some of us do not get a chance to use these methodologies. Is a project a way to put this knowledge into practice? But then, how do I start a project if I don’t know what this entails?

I agree with you that learning to use some tool or some language is useless, since most of us can learn that on our own time without a problem, or we can get someone to teach us, but I believe it’s not easy to undertake a project. At least I, after going through 3 semesters of school, wouldn’t do a good job since all my information would come from some web site or some similar source. Wouldn’t it be valuable to learn about this? Or perhaps you can give me some good sources, or maybe you can teach me.

January 21, 2005 06:14 PM | mhp commented:

Orlando, regarding your personal interest in Apache, take a look at http://apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html .

Other links on project management issues: http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~tron/opensource/node3.html http://opensource.org/

Also, take a look at lurk the mailing lists of the most active projects at Sourceforge http://www.sf.net . A if there is some project that you are interested in… then get involved in what ever way you can. Most projects usually need help, especially to do the mundane tasks (but it is like a job, start at the bottom and work your way up)

January 22, 2005 01:11 AM | Michel Parisien commented:

mhp gave me an idea after I started reading those links: in the document of CUSEC 2006, it would be a good idea to include some documents published under public licenses or similar licenses into the document that is passed to everyone. Or at the very least, include links, as I am sure while you are doing all the research involved in getting CUSEC setup, that you will stumble upon a great wealth of websites that CUSEC-goers would probably appreciate.

January 22, 2005 10:34 AM | mhp commented:

Michel, I agree with you that it would be beneficial to the community that attends CUSES to know about, and understand the issues surrounding the various licenses. But I think that have them in the mass of documenation (Programs, Bios, Abstracts, etc.) they may get missed, or not read.

A better venue to inform the SE public more about these licenses might be submissions of article here at Protose.org. If you, or anyone else for that matter, whould like to report on a particular license or compare some of them, please submit it via email to John or myself.

January 22, 2005 11:10 AM | Michel Parisien commented:

I guess I wasn’t clear in the last post. Forget all my mentions of licenses. I didn’t limit myself to licenses, but to any documentation about anything SE related. And as I have said, a list of printed links would be fine. And, for convenience, maybe you could have them on the website so that people need only click on the links rather than retype them. I am saying this because I noticed one of the long-term things I got out of CUSEC 2005 were links that different keynotes wrote on the blackboard.

January 22, 2005 11:14 AM | mhp commented:

Same things go (for the idea of article submissions) for say the Apache Foundation and structure. Or just your own research about how projects start, what is involved, what works, what does not, etc. If you think some idea is interesting, it is likely that someone else will as well… so write it up and share. (if you’ve got the time, we all know what that is like;)

January 22, 2005 11:25 AM | Michel Parisien commented:

To further clarify, I didn’t mean just documentation. For example, maybe have two sections. One which is home links and contains stuff like: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ http://www.slashdot.org/

And a documentation links section which could contain documentation for various things: http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/ http://python.org/doc/

Just an idea. I know I would have fun digesting such links on my free time, and you can get a lot more new links with a page-o-links than you ever could by navigating the net haphazardly.

January 23, 2005 01:34 PM | John Kopanas commented:

To comment on Orlando’s and MHP’s discussion. I do agree with MHP that a showcase of open source software is better suited for a conference specifically on that topic but I think Orlando is onto something. Maybe we can have a session specifically on how to start a project on your own spare time either going the open source route or any other route that is out there. This way people can take what they learnt at the conference and put it into practice.

January 24, 2005 02:28 PM | Ness commented:

Here is a thread on /. about starting up your own OSS project, but the lessons are applicable to any project. Enjoy.

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/10/147231&tid=156&tid=4

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