CUSEC 2006 - Part I
Posted by Skrud at Friday, January 20th 2006 at 10:34am
CUSEC 2006 is finally underway.
Yesterday was the first day of the conference, and opened with Chad Fowler as a keynote. He spoke a bit about his book, My Job Went To India (and all I got was this lousy book) which has a double meaning, since he actually did go to India to set up some code-producing studios. One thing he stressed is that the jobs that are going to India, are those that we probably wouldn’t want anyway - the sit-in-your-cubicle-and-code-monkey-all-day - as oppose to the jobs that require actual design work and interaction with stakeholders.
Chad made some excellent points - emphasized by his saxophone - about how the code that you write will never really get seen by a user. So no matter how beautiful, artful or esoteric it may be (he played some harmonic overtones that sounded … awkward … to me, but would apparently blow the mind of any sax player), your end-user audience would never really appreciate it. He also encouraged us to find whatever it is we like doing, to just go ahead and do it. In Chad’s case, he decided that he wanted to be a Ruby programmer. And now he is, and he’s happy doing it.
Following Chad Fowler was Robert Sabourin, who found parallels between Hollywood movies and software development. For example, the idea of storyboards being similar to use cases, writers being like desginers and actors like developers. He extends the metaphor by showing a number of clips of movies ranging from Austin Powers to Office Space and Star Wars to illustrate certain elements of software development.
Take Mustafa from Austin Powers, for example, who can’t stand to be asked the same question three times. Austin asks him “Where is Dr. Evil’s Secret Volcano Lair?”, and then “Do I really have to ask this two more times?”, Mustafa responds with “Well, your second question was Do I really have to ask this two more times? which would be the first question in a new line of questioning…”. Austin responds with something along the lines of “Why are you slavish to the three-question form?”. Robert used this to point out that you should never be slavish to any particular pattern or form, but to be agile and flexible in your software development.
Of course, there was also the obligatory moment of Yoda wizardry: “Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.” That one’s pretty self-explanatory.
Concordia’s Nancy Acemian spoke about what she learned from working with Software Engineering students in developing a “Learning & Teaching Environment” which would visually demonstrate simple programming constructs to new computer science students. They seemed to have built a pretty interesting framework using Java applets that hopefully can be extended to help students in other courses. It seemed to me that students are surprisingly good at creating software for other students. Being familiar with the learning process for programming, for example, they were capable of generating excellent exercises for learning things such as nested loops and if statements. I wonder if something like MyConcordia would be a much better portal if it were developed by students, who would better understand their own needs for a registration / school portal. (Nancy decided my question was too “political” to warrant an answer).
University of Waterloo’s head delegate, Orlando Marquez, gave a talk on the Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform which he had worked on during a co-op term at IBM. The Eclipse TPTP is used for performance analysis, and can be easily extended using the Eclipse Plug-in API for whatever needs you might have. It actually seems pretty cool, so I think I’ll look into it some more.
There were some lightning paper presentations (about 15 minutes each paper). Dr. Peter Forbrig and (I think) Gregor Buchholz spoke about some interesting model-based development topics for UI, as well as task-models and “remote usability testing”. They developed a framework for Eclipse that allowed for the creation of task models, and (eventually) should allow for code generation. These apps can then send feedback to a server about the UI experience so that data can be gathered about the system’s UI performance.
Then I ran off to McKibbins for dinner followed by the evening party, which included many drunken karaoke singers and a helluva lot of fun. The party was a huge success, and we got a pretty decent turnout. Some 6/49’s (mod 2) were had, this time consisting of: Sour Puss, Crème de Menthe, and Canadian Club. (The club in Toronto also had Sour Puss and Crème de Menthe in their 6/49… interesting). There was karaoke, and people actually sang and got into it. I was glad! (A huge thanks to Frankie for driving me home).
With a bit of a hangover and some coffee, I’m back this morning. :D
