On January 19-21, a delegation of students from the University of Waterloo, along with over a hundred other people from schools around the country, gathered at the Delta Centre-Ville in Montreal, Quebec for the 11th annual Canadian University Software Engineering Conference (CUSEC). The delegation, led by Kevin Veloso, a fourth year Software Engineering student and contributor to The Iron Warrior, consisted of Software Engineering students from all on-stream classes and one Computer Science student.
This year’s conference, titled “Turing Complete,” was named in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing, one of the founding fathers of computer science’s birth. However, the conference featured speakers from a multitude of backgrounds speaking on an even wider range of topics. These speakers were divided into three categories: tutorials, academic & corporate, and keynotes.
The tutorials were an opportunity for delegates to be able to learn about new areas and aspects of software engineering design. For example, Microsoft’s Susan Ibach conducted a tutorial on how to build Windows Phone apps. During the talk, she built an app in front of the audience and showed the steps that one needed to take in order to build, test and publish an app for Windows Phone. Another tutorial, conducted by Alex Dashkalov, focused on concurrent programming and how to effectively implement that into software.
The academic and corporate speakers presented on topics that they were either currently researching or deeply involved with at their respective schools or companies. Many of these talks were highly technical, but were still an amazing insight into how some of our favourite software actually works. Two of the favourite corporate speakers were Vic Keenan, a Senior Engineer from Riot Games, the creators of the extremely popular game League of Legends, and Rian Hunter from Dropbox.
Vic Keenan’s talk centered around how the spectator mode for League of Legends works and how it was designed. This talk included details on how Riot implemented this mode from both the in-game perspective and from the back-end server perspective. Furthermore, he went into great detail on how this mode is able to scale in the future and how the company handles privacy for its users.
At the Dropbox talk, Rian Hunter explained how Dropbox was able to integrate into the Mac OS X finder and the hoops that they had to jump through to implement this feature. The technical aspects of the talk were centered on how the engineers used very low level C code to trick the operating system into thinking that the Dropbox client was a part of the finder when it actually was not. An unexpected but enjoyable surprise was the presence of an Apple engineer who worked on the OS X operating system. It was almost if trying to break the software was a game of cat and mouse between Apple and Dropbox, but in the end, both Rian and the engineer created an extremely informative and enjoyable discussion.
The keynote speakers were, by far, the most popular and drew the most visible response from the audience. These speakers focused on topics ranging from the bizarre to awe-inspiring. The first keynote was presented by Jeremy Ashkenas, the creator of the CoffeeScript programming language and a member of the Interactive News team at The New York Times. His keynote was a thought provoking exposition on why we should treat code as art. He focused on examples from programming languages with elegant, clean syntax such as Python and Ruby and showed that when written properly, code can truly be art.
The second keynote was presented by Andrew Rothbart, a software engineer at Facebook and explained how the Like button actually functions from both a front and back-end perspective. This keynote was the most corporate of the bunch but showed how massive Facebook’s influence on the internet is.
The third keynote, which arguably was the most beneficial to those from the Waterloo delegation, was presented by Gayle McDowell, the author of two bestselling books on how to get and succeed in technical interviews. She went into great detail on how a resume should look, how technical interviews usually work and what type of questions to expect when you do go into an interview with a company like Google or Amazon.
The fourth keynote was an unexpectedly awe-inspiring presentation by Bret Victor, a former engineer in Apple’s research and development labs. He presented multiple demos where he freely manipulated images, animations and algorithms that instantly displayed results on another screen. After each demo was completed, the audience gave applause for over ten seconds and at the end, he was the only speaker to receive a standing ovation.
The fifth keynote was presented by a leading contributor to the Linux kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman, and explained the process on how the kernel is modified and updated. He also went into great depth on which companies contribute time and money to developing the kernel and how the audience could become involved in the largest open-source project on the internet.
The last, and possibly most politically relevant speaker at the time, was Alexis Ohanian, one of the co-founders of Reddit and a strong anti-SOPA/PIPA activist. This talk was especially relevant because only few days prior, he was instrumental into coordinating the blackout of Reddit, Wikipedia and many other websites across the internet. He discussed why we should pay attention to all political issues relating to the internet and the logistics behind the actual blackout that occurred on January 18th.
Manveer Heir, a senior designer working at BioWare Montreal on Mass Effect 3, also had a talk prepared for the attendees. His talk was titled “Tighten up the Graphics on Level 3” and tried to convince the audience why they should not work in the video game industry. This was one of the more bizarre talks because no one really ever expects to have an industry veteran try to convince an extremely talented group of software engineers to avoid their field.
The organizers of CUSEC did a fantastic job of organizing this all-star lineup of speakers; however, the career fair was even more amazing. At the career fair there were over 15 companies looking to hire students for both full-time and co-op jobs. Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, and Adobe were all present and excited to be socializing with the next potential set of employees. Furthermore, one of the companies, Morgan Stanley, held a coding competition where a team from Waterloo came in third place out of over 30 submissions.
For those that were unable to attend CUSEC that are highly interested in Software Engineering and computer programming, I highly recommend that you seek out the head delegate for next year’s conference and look into going. You will learn more in the span of three days about jobs, technology and opportunities than you would in many of your terms at Waterloo. Also don’t think that us Softies sit around and code all day; we can party too, especially in Montreal.
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