CUSEC 2012 Turing Complete, Complete

I’ve been meaning to start blogging as one of my new years resolutions to be cooler and more awesome, but what triggered me to get going right now and not later is because I can’t not keep thinking about this year’s CUSEC. It was only my second CUSEC, but I still really feel like this year was a really exceptional conference. Here’s a wrap-up of the things I learned this year, my favourite parts, and my thoughts on how to make the most of attending this sort of thing.

Pro-tips

Ditch your friends

We all love our friends. They’re like bonus family who are there to help you when you need to borrow a soldering iron, play StarCraft, or reach things on tall shelves, and it’s really tempting to want to hang out with them all weekend. It’s a trap! As soon as we hit the hotel, I bailed on my trusty uOttawa friends and started meeting all sorts of new people. My absolute favourite part of the conference this year was all the people I met (aawwwww), and now I’m just that much closer to a world where I’ll never not be able to reach the tall shelves again.

Don’t sleep in

Note that I didn’t say don’t spend the whole weekend drunk. Just push through the misery and stumble downstairs in the morning anyway. From what I’ve seen this year and last, CUSEC has a lot of very high-level, big picture talks (which I absolutely love), but some of the early-morning tutorials and things have the really neat low-level techy stuff you won’t want to miss either.

Most useful resource I never knew I needed

CareerCup.com

I like to think I put together a pretty good CV, but Gayle Laakmann McDowell had a lot of seriously pro tips to push your job applying to the next level. I think the practice problems she talked about would be really good to work through just for shits to keep our brains sharp and stuff, like instead of doing a crossword or something. Seriously, I’m going to start doing this on a regular basis, I’ll let you guys know if it makes me feel smarter. She also had some really cool insight on some questions that a few of us fellow tech ladies had about being tech ladies, I’ll talk about that stuff another day. Also she’s just super classy and nice. 

Coolest employers at the career fair

Shopify

I think I met almost all of the Shopify people there (there’s a ton of them!), and they were all super cool. The company has been growing pretty fast lately, and they’ve even got everyone’s favourite accordion guy, Joey deVilla, so there’s got to be something pretty cool going on in there. 

Dropbox

Same dealio as Shopify but on the west coast (which they do say is the best coast). Small company with really nice people and bomb-diggity corporate culture, and apparently they have a DDR machine. Also Rian Hunter’s talk on some low-level script injection stuff that was super cool but I didn’t understand nearly well enough to relay what it was about, was super cool. 

Speaker who was the biggest doppleganger of one of our professors

Greg Kroah-Hartman is seriously an anglophone Daniel Amyot. Right guys? Am I right? It was uncanny.

Best swag

Riot Games

LoL is free to play so really a USB stick with the LoL installer isn’t really that big of a deal, but it somehow just warmed our hearts. A few of us have never played it, and now that I have it on a flash drive gifted directly from the creators, I’m dying to check it out. Weird. I lost my free character skin code thing though, and I’m a bit hurt. 

Worst swag

Apple

Your water bottle has been leaking all over my bag all morning.

Tech stuff I want to check out and play with after hearing about it

Batman.js

I don’t know much about these JavaScript wrapper framework type things and I’ve heard there’s a whole bunch of different ones, so I don’t really know if it’s better to geek out choosing one and take forever researching all the things, or just go with the one with the coolest name, but batman.js looks pretty slick. Development was super rapid, and the code was clear and good-looking like a summer day. 

Best talks overall that you’ll definitely want to watch online when they post the video even if you were there anyways

Opening keynote - Jeremy Ashkenas, and closing keynote, Alexis Ohanian

Without the in-between stuff, there would have been no conference, but these were probably the best selection of opening and closing talks I could have dreamed of. Jeremy’s talk was one of those super high-level talks that just makes you feel at peace, and Alexis is practically some kind of super-hero (even though he’d totally deny it). These talks made the difference between going to CUSEC and learning some cool stuff, and going to CUSEC and coming out on the other side feeling like a whole new person.