My responsibilities as co-chair of CUSEC 2009 have been catching up to me, and it’s time for me to get my ass in gear and focus on what’s really important: making CUSEC 2009 kick ass. We’ve had our set of hiccups along the road, and it’s a rocky/bumpy/pothole-filled road at best.

But I’m not worried. And the reason I’m not worried is because of what makes CUSEC so amazing in the first place, and that’s the quality of the presentations that we get and can bring in front of hundreds of students from across Canada. Today we released the first keynote speech video from CUSEC 2008: Tim Bray presenting “Hard Problems in Network Computing”. If you think that sounds dry, then you’ve obviously never seen a CUSEC presentation before.

This is fascinating stuff. Enjoy it, share it, and spread it around! :)

Tim Bray – Hard Problems in Network Computing from CUSEC on Vimeo.

This year I was an organizer for the first time, and settled happily into my role as Director of Promotions. My job was to find new head delegates and make sure that the conference was well advertised. What I actually did amounted more to making sure there was enough actual content out there to convince people to come to the conference. This meant pushing people to update the web site with stuff like FAQ’s, blogging about why people should attend CUSEC, advertising it to people on Facebook, and – back at Concordia – speaking in classrooms and selling tickets.

And now I’m co-chair for CUSEC 2009. Because I refuse to disappear from CUSEC just because I’m graduating this spring.

This year was a blast! We had more delegates than ever before, so many that we were running out of places to put them, with people having to stand in the back during some of the speeches. This means that next year we’ll need some more space. Maybe we can even move into the giant auditorium (”Le Grand Salon”).

Another great thing this year: the students were unusually outgoing. We’ve never had more than 75 people show up for the pub night parties, but this year we must’ve had about 200 people. I got to experience what it was like to run around a crowded bar with plates of food, delivering nachos and quesadillas and chicken wings to hungry delegates. We’ll need to find a bigger place than Brutopia. On the second day of the conference, so many people were running up to me asking “so where are we going to party tonight?” … We had nothing planned, so I told them I was heading to Pub Distillerie. I think this was a mistake, since the bar was so packed that I couldn’t even get in… (this was after redirecting people to McKibbins, too!)

CUSEC has always had the ability to win the hearts and minds of delegates and speakers alike. And this year, as always, we’ve had a stellar lineup of speakers. Unfortunately, being an organizer means I sometimes have to miss speeches in order to run errands, or prepare for the next speech, or set up another event. Unfortunately Tim Bray’s opening keynote was one of these. Luckily we videotaped all the speeches (and we’ll be putting them up as soon as we can). I was really happy to read about Tim’s experience at the conference.

One of our speakers whom I was really excited about bringing was Jeff Atwood. He is the author of codinghorror.com and practically one of my heroes. I learn a lot from reading his blog daily, even if he’s writing about something seemingly obvious, because he often puts things into a context that I didn’t think of. You should read what he wrote about his first day at CUSEC.

Another speaker that seemed to surprise everyone with shock value, was Zed Shaw. Zed not only fulfilled his duty as a keynote speaker by giving some important life lessons during his keynote speech (i.e., don’t get an MBA because the first thing they do to geeks who get an MBA is lobotomized them), but he was at every party, every event, and hung around with delegates for the entire conference. We got to learn a lot from him, just from hanging out and talking to him.

One of the best parts of CUSEC is the fact that the speakers who come to the conference are often willing to meet and chat with students outside the context of the lectures, completely informally. Jeff Atwood, for example, came to the pub night, and we taught him and his wife to play Bunnies. Kate Hollenbach was there too, and I’m told she drank everyone under the table. Of course it’s not only drinking. We had students interview the speakers on camera, for example, and hopefully we can get those edited into a nice montage and put it up on YouTube to seed advertising for next year. :)

There is altogether way too much to talk about as far as CUSEC goes, and it only gets better each year.