Djief’s Blog

I wanted to write a more detailed post about CUSEC, like I did last year. I tried a couple of times but I couldn’t find a really good way of putting it all together. I always wanted my blog to help me get better at writing. Maybe I put too much pressure on myself to write a long article.

However, there certainly were a couple of interesting ideas I heard at the conference that I want to share, or at least that I want to catalog in my blog. So here they are, at random (well not totally, in the order I heard them):

Day 1

Pete McBreen

• The "It works as designed" mindset. (There was a very funny example about a motorcycle, anyone remembers what it was?)
• We should sign our work, take responsibility for the systems we create.
• Learn from experience with project retrospectives.
• We need to promote fun process because excitement is a good predictor of quality.

Austin Hill

• Startups can stay small today.
• VCs expect market traction for a software company, so it’s important to get it out soon.
• Find mentors and coaches.
• Technical risks are low today. You take creative risk.
• Forget plans. Have fun. Choose what not to do.

Greg Brill

• Aptitude. Attitude. Experience. Favor the first two.
• Elevator pitch can be summed to "What do you want?".
• Trust your instincts.
• Attitude is king. Avoid the bitch cluster.

Other presentations of the day:

• Jim Cordy about what is a professionnal software engineer.
• Someone from SAP talks about Web 2.0

Day 2

Dave Thomas

• Dave starts his presentation by taking off his shoes.
• Use of fear to manipulate. FUD is used to sell.
• Risk management is important
• You can’t live without taking risks.
• Do not be afraid to make mistakes.
• Opposite of risk is stagnation.

Ralph Johnson

• The word maintenance has a bad stigma.
• Maintenance is increasing.
• Programming is program transformation.

Other presentations of the day:

• Dr Lee McIntyre about the User Experience team at Business Objects.
• A presentation of Mylar, an interesting plugin for Eclipse.
• Panel discussion wasn’t very good, lacking direction and a central theme.

Day 3

Venkat Subramaniam

• The key to beginning agility: attitude.
• Fixing problems is a top priority, not blames.
• A mistake is an oppportunity to learn.
• Keep up with change, but keep your balance.
• Take control.  Find a rhythm for everything. Tackle tasks regularly. Set small goals.
• Don’t listen, educate customer.
• Decide what you shouldn’t decide.
• Timeboxing.

Other presentations of the day:

• Geoff Guenther, about high performance databases at Direct Energy.
• Timothy Lethbridge, about the resistance to HCI.
• Kokoromi

Well that’s it for CUSEC for 2007. Going through my notes, there clearly was an idea that come up a lot: Make mistakes and learn from them.