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CUSEC 2005 Impressions from the eyes of a Computer Scientist

CUSEC | February 02, 2005 | 0 comments

Computer Scientists and Software Engineers. I never really knew the difference before attending my very first CUSEC. I never really thought of myself as either (even though my degree is a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and I don’t have an over glorified five-cent ring). But walking away from CUSEC 2005, I have to admit, I’m jealous of all the undergrads in software engineering. The topics discussed at the conference were always the topics I was more interested in when I was an undergrad at Concordia, but instead I learned the oh-so interesting language of assembly (all you MASM lovers, please direct hate & death threat mails to john.kopanas [at] protose [dot] org). In all honesty, if I had to go back and do my undergrad again, I definitely would have done a software engineering degree (but in my defence, it wasn’t offered at Concordia until my 2nd year).

That being said, why were there so few Computer Science students at CUSEC? Is it a sibling rivalry? Is the organizing committee advertising to CS undergrads? The obvious answer is that the SE in CUSEC stands for software engineering. But, from my understanding, software engineering is a very multi-disciplinary field of study and the community, and subject matter, seem to welcome other disciplines of study (the easiest example that comes to mind is Psychology). No doubt CS undergrads would benefit as much, if not more, than SE students as the material covered would most likely be relatively new to them. In general, I definitely think that everyone would benefit from having more synergy in the software development community (I know software engineers hate this term, but that is the ultimate end-goal, to develop software). Anything that inspires thought is a great thing, and that was exactly what CUSEC 2005 did for me. Since the conference, I started reading some of Kent Beck’s work, I’m attending XP day in Toronto and I bought an iBook :-).

On a final note, the conference itself was an absolute blast for me. Being from Montreal and never going through the dorm experience, I definitely got a feel of it on Saturday night in room 907. I’m pretty sure we had most, if not all of the out-of-town students partying in our room. It was pretty cool (even though I found myself spooning with Pavlidis on Sunday morning).

I can’t wait for CUSEC 2006. Expectations are probably quite high, but just from the buzz I can feel from the organizing committee, CUSEC 2006 will really deliver… for starters it’s being held in Montreal :-).

Hope to see you all there!

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