Geekflex

A lot of people complain about the fact that CUSEC is held on the second or third week of January. It’s cold in Montreal in January. We’ve had years where it’s been -40 degrees with the wind chill ¹, and some people find this tough to take. There are many good reasons to hold the conference in January, but the bottom line is it’s the best time to do it. That sounds like a subjective statement, but take a step back and seriously think about other possible times to hold the conference.

September and October are no good because they’re too early. This would also require that all of our promotion and advertising happens over the summer, when fewer people around to get pitched to ². Not to mention that these months are full of orientation activities, and the new students are so disoriented that you won’t be able to sell a single ticket to them. Most of them won’t have even learned “Hello, World” yet, and something like CUSEC will just seem massively intimidating.

November is an interesting month, because it tends to be between midterms and finals. In fact, the Impact National Conference tends to be held around this time each year. The reason I don’t think it’s particularly feasible for CUSEC, though, is that we would still be alienating the first-year students. Again, many of them will be learning to program for the first time. While CUSEC hasn’t been that technical in recent years, I think at least one full semester studying software engineering or computer science should be a pre-requisite for attending CUSEC. You’ll have at least some idea of what’s going on.

December is an obvious one, as is April. Two words: exams, vacation. Even for the students that don’t study very hard, December and April are busy months filled with studying and cramming and exam-taking. Once exams are over, a lot of students leave town and go on vacation, or home for the holidays. Hosting a conference during winter break means no one will show up.

February is a complicated month. Each school has it’s “Reading Week” in February. While it might seem like a good idea to host a conference when everyone is off school for a mid-term break, note that schools often have different weeks off. Even McGill and Concordia can’t agree on when their reading week should occur. ETS doesn’t even get a full week, but two days. To make matters worse, when students aren’t on their week-long breaks, February tends to be jam-packed with midterms.

March can be lumped in with November, except that there is a lot more going on in March. This is when most universities hold their award and special ceremonies, for example the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer, when engineering students in Canada are betrothed with an Iron Ring. These happen at various times throughout the month, and we would certainly lose any final year students should CUSEC conflict with their ceremony. There are various other award and scholarship ceremonies that carry a higher obligation. Another reason we don’t hold CUSEC in March is to avoid conflict with CS Games, which is an event that has a high overlap of participants with CUSEC. Also National Engineering Week Month occupies most students in engineering programs during the entire first week of March. This year, the Canadian University Technology Conference is being held in March — this very week — and I know Concordia is not sending a delegation because it conflicts with their engineering student awards banquet.

Last but not least, January is when hotels and conference centres are the cheapest. As a student-oriented conference (and a non-profit organization), we have to make sure that we can keep our operating costs low enough so that students can actually afford to attend. In January, hotels and conference centres are so desperate for attention that they’ll make insane deals just to fill up their rooms and take whatever they can get. The summer months are prime tourism season. Hotel rooms easily double and sometimes even quadruple in cost. Despite the fact that most students won’t even be thinking of school, let alone an extra-curricular conference in summer.

Another question I often get with regard to the dates is Why does CUSEC run from Thursday to Saturday instead of from Friday to Sunday? Students have to miss two full days of class to come attend CUSEC, and then have nothing to do on Sunday. One reason for this is a logistical one that has to do with our speakers. The keynote speakers that present at CUSEC are very often coming from the opposite end of the continent. In order to make sure that the CUSEC experience runs as smoothly as possible, we make sure they have the full day on Sunday to travel back home — wherever that may be. In some cases — as in the people coming from British Columbia or California — travel will easily take them an entire day. We want the speakers to stick around for as much of the conference as possible, so we make sure they have Sunday free to travel back. It would suck if all the speakers left on the second day and only one or two were sticking around for the third.

Having Sunday off is also leaves the door open for students to stick around Montreal for an extra day of sightseeing and tourism which, believe it or not, is an option that a lot of delegates actually do take. It also allows for students have the time to travel back themselves so that they don’t have to miss class on Monday. Finally, Sunday is a mental-health day for the organizers. We need the time to de-stress, unwind and take in everything that’s happened. It might be a little selfish, but trust me — we need it.

This January marked the culmination of a year’s worth of hard work, as I was the co-chair of the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference (CUSEC). Throughout the organization process we had to make a lot of tough decisions. Overall, the conference was a huge success. Including our speakers and sponsors, we had over 400 people attending. The talks (I’m told) were amazing, and people felt inspired.

This first installment is about why we hold CUSEC in Montreal.

You may have noticed that each year, with only one exception in 2005, CUSEC has been held in Montreal. I often get asked why we don’t move CUSEC around, specifically I’ve heard the question “Why not Toronto?” at least twice each year for as long as I can remember. There are a number of reasons we keep CUSEC firmly planted in Montreal, and why we will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

The first reason is student density. Montreal has more post-secondary students per capita than any other city in North America ¹. This includes four major engineering schools each with Software Engineering programs: Concordia, McGill, École de Technologie Supérieur, and École Polytechnique. Concordia alone sends more delegates than any other school, with over 70 students each year.

The second reason is that Montreal is fun, and it most certainly has that reputation. To the students coming from quieter university towns, CUSEC is a good excuse to come to Montreal and party. The one year CUSEC was held in Ottawa, attendance dropped tremendously, and the increased cost of transportation and lodging was enough to discourage Concordians from coming out in their usual numbers. The fact that CUSEC includes a trip to Montreal is actually a very big draw for a lot of students, and a lot of them like to take the time to tour the city while they’re out here.

Then there’s real reason we keep CUSEC in Montreal: The legal drinking age in Quebec is 18. If we were to host the conference in Ontario, a significant portion of potential delegates wouldn’t bother to attend — especially those students are still 18 years old and hail from Quebec. Why would they travel to spend a weekend at a conference and be forced to skip the inevitable parties?

CUSEC is primarily an educational conference, and it always will be. However, even though the main focus of the conference is on content, we take the fun factor very seriously. I strongly believe that you will learn more from sitting down and having a beer with one of our keynote speakers than you would from being lectured at. That’s why the pub night has become such a tradition. I would feel terrible for anyone who had to miss out on a social event like that simply because they were underage. It’s also a fantastic opportunity to meet and network and socialize with students from other schools (and something I don’t think we did a great job with this year, but more on that in a future post).

Throughout my university career I had goals. I used to think these were simple, common goals. I wanted to graduate and get a job. I got a job offer before I graduated — a full school year before I graduated, even — which allowed me to enjoy my last year of school to the fullest without the stress of figuring out what I wanted to do and job hunting. I thought I dodged the bullet that traps nearly every other student in their last year: the now what syndrome.

Moving to another city for work certainly accelerated things, but it didn’t take long before I contracted the now what syndrome myself. Graduated from university? Check. Got a job? Check. Now what? I have no goals. I have ambition, drive, and energy — but I don’t feel like I have any outlet for it.

I lost track of my passion. It’s not something I found even while performing a job that I found extremely interesting. It kept my brain stimulated, but not my heart. I had moved away from my friends and my social life came to a grinding halt. I couldn’t find people my age through work, and the city didn’t provide anywhere near the level of cultural entertainment that my hometown did. I had no friends, except when I went home on the weekends, and my weeks were spent in social misery. All that for a job that didn’t love. I enjoyed it, but I felt like I was missing out on the parts of life that made me truly happy: the time I would spend with friends. And so I moved back.

Naturally, being back home didn’t solve all my problems — but I didn’t expect it to. My motivation was to buy myself some more time to find out what it is I really want to do. In the meantime, I have my friends close by, and a day job that keeps me on track with paying back my student loans.

But I still spend most of my time thinking about it: What should I do with my life?

Ever since I was a child I had assumed that computers and programming were my calling. My mother’s reminded me that when I was 2 or 3 years old I received a plastic computer toy as a birthday present which, after opening, caused me to ignore all the other birhtday presents. I was too weak to actually press the buttons so I would grab my father’s finger and point it to the keys I wanted to get pushed. The toy was actually really silly, but my life has been tied to computers ever since. It was one of these Tomy Tutor Play Computers, which I can’t believe I was able to find a picture of.

I love programming. I enjoy doing it. I love solving problems and the feeling I get when I accomplish something. The inherent frustration of trial-and-error and incremental improvements is easily bearable because of my adoration for the craft. I’ve had people tell me that they were jealous of the fact that I’ve known what I wanted to do for essentially my whole life. Maybe I give off that impression when I talk about programming, but it’s not an end — it’s a means to an end. It’s a skill that I love using but one can’t simply program for the sake of programming. It’s a skill that needs to be applied, and I’m still hunting for that application.

Only recently have I begun to realize that my original goals — graduating and finding a job — were oversimplified. I did so much more in my experiences at university that weren’t directly related to either graduating or finding a job. Some things — such as involvement in many student associations — may have even been detrimental to those goals since they took my focus away from schoolwork. Not that I ever cared much for schoolwork. My goals not only weren’t as simple as I thought they were, they were hardly what was driving me.

The aspects of being a student that I loved had precious little to do with class, graduating, or future employment. Maybe those weren’t actually my goals in the first place. I just thought they were. I found fulfillment in all the activities I did that were only tangentially related to my duties as a student. I kept myself immensely busy by attending nearly every conference, participating in nearly every competition, and helping to organize these events for others. I was constantly meeting new people, making new friends, discovering new tools and concepts and learning at a pace that was exponentially quicker than what I would’ve been exposed to in class. I took advantage of being a student to do all the things that a student studying software engineering could possibly do. No wonder I felt empty once I gave up the student identity that had served me so well.

Maybe it’s not the programming that I love after all, but all the things that it has enabled me to do. When I shed my student identity and all the conferences, competitions and activities it opened up to me, programming became … well, it became dull.

The lesson I’ve learned through all of this should’ve been obvious, since it was a major point of Jeff Atwood’s CUSEC 2008 Keynote, and a famous anecdote from Into The Wild: Happiness only real when shared. Programming makes me happy, but only insomuch as I’m able to share it with others.

One of the things I miss most about being a student is the regular change of scenery. A typical day of my student life involved being in several different places throughout the day, from classrooms to student common areas to offices. I’d rarely stay in one place for very long. Not only was each class in a different physical location, requiring me to get up and move around a bit — but in each class I’d see a different subset of friends and acquaintances.

When I started my full time job, I quickly became agitated by the monotony of office life. Each day I’d be surrounded by the exact same subset of coworkers. I would sit in my one office, without anywhere else to go. Eventually the end of the day would come and I would go home. Sometimes I would go to the bathroom; a trip made infinitely more exciting by Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader, conveniently placed in every stall. My office building was in total suburbia, so meeting up with friends for lunch was all but impossible. I was in a private inner office, which meant I had no access to natural light and was pretty much just left alone all day every day in the same room, sitting on the same chair, with the same four walls boxing me in.

I’m not exaggerating. This is what office life is. The contrast between a dynamic student lifestyle and a “professional” lifestyle is staggering. It’s not that the stuff I was working on is boring — far from it. It’s just that the environment was about as stimulating and invigorating as white noise. I couldn’t focus on anything and my mind would wander. It doesn’t have to be like this.

I might be an exceptional case, but I’ve always concentrated better when there were more things going on around me. The background noise of a coffee shop would help me focus better. When studying for my final exams, I’d take over a conference room at school with a few friends. The occasional distractions we provided each other was like the seasoning on an otherwise really bland steak. It made for an environment where studying was bearable, and I managed to get much more done than I would have been able to if I’d stayed home alone with a textbook.

The day I was most productive at work was the one day I managed to work remotely from another lab. But working remotely (or working “from home”) isn’t the solution. A “change of scenery” doesn’t mean “working alone.” Collaboration is important, and you need to be able to ask questions of your teammates, and brainstorm with them. Instant messaging and e-mail only work up to a certain extent, but nothing compares with face-to-face interaction. This was the main point of Fred Brooks’ keynote speech from OOPSLA ’07 (listen to the mp3 if you have 1.5 hours), and there is research and evidence to back it up.

The best thing to do is offer some alternative scenery at the workplace. IBM’s software lab in Markham, Ontario is a stellar example. The top floor of this lab has four different “theme rooms” that employees can use. One room is modeled after a medieval library with antique bookshelves full of ancient-looking books and wing-backed chairs. Another room looks like a fishing cabin with couches and paintings of canoes along the walls. My favourite room was the “Japanese Garden” which had a rock garden and an indoor waterfall between rice-paper walls. To make these rooms accessible, each employee receives a laptop as their primary workstation. If you ever need a change of scenery, just unplug your laptop and go sit near the waterfall. The theme rooms offer a change of scenery and, since you’re not leaving the lab, your teammates are always close by for when you need to collaborate.

My ideal environment would be just like the study space we improvised during exam period: a big room with a small group of coworkers. We don’t all have to be working on the same things, but just having other people there is a motivator. The occasional distractions and small talk would keep the day interesting, and I’d be able to focus better on my work. I know this kind of environment exists, because this is almost exactly what my Extreme Blue internship was like. The trick is going to be finding a similar environment now that I’m no longer a student.

I’m going to let you in on a secret: I think better inside the box. When faced with limitless possibilities and endless choices I get overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. I’m pretty good at getting from point A to point B, but I need to know is where point B is. I can figure out where point A is by analysing the current situation, whatever that may be.

When it comes to programming, point B is usually a working program that performs a given feature set. Point A is me with my set of tools. Those tools include programming languages, problem solving experience, Google-fu and whatever I have installed on my computer. These are among the items I have in my box. There are lots of things I can do inside my box, and the better I understand these tools the more I can do with them.

In life, my box contains all the people I’ve encountered, everything I’ve ever learned and all the experiences I’ve ever had. The universe according to me is everything that I can see from within my box. The skills I’ve developed, from professional to social, are also tools in my box. When graduating from university was my point B, it was these tools that I relied on to make it there. I honed and sharpened them and got used to them. My box was geared entirely towards achieving my goal. Once I graduated — my point B reached — I was left with a box of tools, and the feeling that most of them were no longer relevant. I found myself wondering now what?

I’m stuck in a box.

The lesson I’ve been slowly coming to terms with is that the universe doesn’t fit in a box. This box wasn’t always closed. The goals and tools that were there had to come from somewhere. I’m the one that limited my vision and focused too closely on a particularly moment. The box needs to open up again and let new goals find their way in. I can learn new skills and new tools and sharpen them as necessary. I’ll meet new people and let them help shape part of my universe. I just don’t know how I’m going to do it yet.

But I do know that I’m getting out of my box.

See you on the flip side. ;-)