#CUSEC09: Day 2 report

Yesterday was not nearly as full of a day for me, partly due to technical difficulties.

I started out the day with James Golick‘s tutorial on dynamic languages. Unfortunately he couldn’t get the projector working due to issues with his MacBook. Since it was a tutorial the projector was essential, so after a several attempts it was cancelled and people shuffled to the Facebook tutorial. In my web programming course I had already learned about the API so I took the opportunity to get lunch. I spent too much time out there and didn’t return in time for the next session.

I returned in time for Avi Bryant‘s talk. Quote of the presentation, paraphrased: “… and if you find Montréal cold, you haven’t been drinking enough. With brings me to career advice…” He taught us that bad programmers copy, good programmers steal. That is, take advantage of all of the research that we as computers science students have access to. Implement bleeding edge algorithms. And for God’s sake, don’t write it for developers, write it for users. He suggests that you read proggit and Lambda the Ultimate.

After that came Giles Bowkett‘s keynote. He’s a great speaker and kept the crowd laughing between bursts of profane insight. Unfortunately I couldn’t take notes, his 400 slides were pretty rapid fire, but it was recorded and will be posted. Until then you can watch his previous presentation at RubyFringe. The main thing I took away: Learn everything you can, even if it’s not directly useful it can expand your thinking. Don’t get bogged down in a large corporation if you don’t want to. Also, your small business is not your career, it’s part of your career.

Later on, we checked out La Banquise for poutine. I had a poutine kamikaze. The selection was amazing, they did not skimp on ingredients, and ingredients always consisted of far more than “gravy, fries, dairy product.” I had a forkful of cheese curd the size of a baby’s fist. The portions were gigantic, I couldn’t quite finish it. On the way home I was mystified by the selection of alcohol available in the local Mac’s.

I settled for the night splitting a twelve pack and trying to use the internet. Best Western only allows us 250mb per suite of four people, which as you can imagine does not go far in a room of software engineers. We’ve exceeded our quota every day, and last night we asked them to reset our quota. They did, sort of, by giving us a new wifi key with 100mb and telling us that it will not be renewed. We’re going to run out of wifi before the end of the today I expect. Very disappointing. The cost of transfer is so cheap, especially in Montréal compared to Toronto. I can’t believe Best Western is so stingy. They won’t even let us buy extra quota. They had downtime for most of the first day too. The average Motel 8 had better service. Maybe I ought to stay at one of them for my next conference.