CUSEC 2014

CUSEC 2014 was held in Montreal in January 2014, welcoming hundreds of the best students from across Canada to hear from renown leaders and recognizeable faces such as Bruce Eckel, Gary Bernhardt, Kelsey Gilmore-Innis, Michelle Zatlyn, Zach Holman, Bruno Morency, Ian Chan, and so, so many more.

Speakers & Presentations

The voices that took the stage at this CUSEC.

Bruce Eckel

Owner, MindView, LLC

Bruce Eckel is the author (with Dianne Marsh) of Atomic Scala, Thinking in Java (Prentice-Hall, 1998, 2nd Edition, 2000, 3rd Edition, 2003, 4th Edition, 2006), the Hands-On Java eSeminar (available on the Web site), Thinking in C++ (PH 1995; 2nd edition 2000, Volume 2 with Chuck Allison, 2003), C++ Inside & Out (Osborne/McGraw-Hill 1993), and First Steps in Flex (with James Ward, 2008) among others. He's given hundreds of presentations throughout the world, published over 150 articles in numerous magazines, was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee and speaks regularly at conferences. He was for many years the chair of both the C++ and Java tracks at the Software Development conference, is cofounder of the JavaPosse Roundup Conference and creator of the Scala Summit Conference. He provides public and private training and consulting in programming languages and software system design.

Gary Bernhardt

Creator & Destroyer of Software, Destroy All Software LLC

Gary Bernhardt is a creator and destroyer of software compelled to understand both sides of heated software debates: Vim and Emacs; Python and Ruby; Git and Mercurial. He runs Destroy All Software, which publishes advanced screencasts for serious developers covering Unix, Ruby, OO design, and TDD.

Kelsey Gilmore-Innis

Senior Backend Engineer, Reverb Technologies Inc.

Kelsey Gilmore-Innis is a back-end engineer at Reverb, where she uses Scala & functional programming to build powerful, scalable software systems. She strives to write code with charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent and hopes to one day really, truly, deeply understand what a monad is.

Michelle Zatlyn

Co-founder & Head of User Experience, CloudFlare Inc.

Michelle Zatlyn is the co-founder & Head of User Experience of CloudFlare, the web performance and security company. Michelle creates products people love. Prior to CloudFlare, she worked at Google and Toshiba and launched two successful startups. In 2012, CloudFlare was selected by the Wall Street Journal as the Most Innovative Internet Technology company, and named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. Today CloudFlare accelerates and protects more than 180 billion page views for more than 800 million unique visitors every month. Michelle holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry and a minor in Management, with Distinction, from McGill University. She also holds her MBA from Harvard Business School and was awarded the Dubliner Prize for Entrepreneurship. Michelle is an experienced public speaker, frequent panelist and sits on the Open Internet Advisory Committee for the FCC. She was named one of the Top Women to Watch in Technology by the Huffington Post and one of the Top 15 Women to Watch in Tech by Inc. Magazine.

Zach Holman

Engineer, GitHub

Zach joined GitHub in 2010 as one of their first engineering hires. Initially working on what would become GitHub Enterprise, he now hacks on new features and frequently gives talks about building products and growing startups. He lives in San Francisco.

Don Olmstead

Software Engineer, Sony Network Entertainment International

Description coming soon.

Avi Bryant

Developer, Stripe

Avi has led product, engineering, and data science teams at Etsy, Twitter and Dabble DB (which he co-founded and Twitter acquired). He’s known for his open source work on projects such as Seaside, Scalding, and Algebird. Avi currently works at Stripe.

Bruno Morency

Founder, Context.IO

Description coming soon.

Dr. Derek Ruths

Assistant Professor, Network Dynamics Lab, McGill University

Derek Ruths is an assistant professor of Computer Science at McGill University. He joined the faculty in 2009 after completing his PhD in Computer Science at Rice University. A major research direction in his group considers the problem of characterizing and predicting the large-scale dynamics of human behavior in online social platforms. His ongoing work in this area includes quantitatively modeling how communities change over time, measuring and predicting group demographics from unstructured user-generated content, and computational methods for assessing discussion topics within a collection of users. His work has been published in top-tier journals and conferences including Science, ICWSM, and PLoS Computational Biology. His research is currently funded by a wide array of organizations including NSERC, SSHRC, tech companies, and the US National Science Foundation - underscoring the broad, interdisciplinary nature of his work.

Ian Chan

Engineer, Twitter

Ian Chan is a Staff Engineer at Twitter, where he's worked on the Platform and Web team for the last 3 years. He has a passion for startups, technology, platforms and consumer product development. Prior to moving to San Francisco, he worked in Toronto as a software developer for Big Corporation (read: IBM) and then a hot tech startup (read: tiny defunct startup you've never heard of). Ian received a B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto where he was a regular attendee of CUSEC.

Josh Matthews

Platform Engineer, Mozilla

Josh Matthews is a software developer by trade, education, and passion. He works for Mozilla and has put blood, sweat, and tears into making Firefox a better web browser. Moreover, having spent a number of years as a volunteer for the project, he is fanatical about destroying barriers to entry for new open source contributors, and helping them succeed in whatever challenges they take on.

Julia Evans

Data Scientist & Co-Organizer of Montreal All-Girl Hack Night and PyLadies Montreal

Julia Evans learned to program in math class on her TI-83 graphing calculator. Ten years and a couple of degrees later, she still enjoys programming a lot. She's worked as a web developer and data scientist. She enjoys playing with data and making interesting graphs, learning new programming languages, and learning that things that seem scary actually aren't. She cofounded Montreal All-Girl Hack Night and PyLadies Montréal, hangs out at Montréal Python a lot, and spent the fall of 2013 at Hacker School working on fun coding projects. Come talk to her about any of these things!

Maria Smirnoff

Manager, TechU.Me/MaTechno.me

Maria has attended almost every CUSEC since 2007 as an exhibitor, promoting IBM’s unique, top-talent internship program Extreme Blue. During her time as the Extreme Blue Canada Program Manager, she had the honour and privilege of working with both technical and business student prodigies, most of whom now work at amazing technology companies like Google, IBM, Facebook, Amazon & Shopify (to name just a few). Maria thinks herself extremely fortunate to be able to call most of her former interns great friends. Nowadays, Maria is the Manager of Branding and Partnerships at TechU.me – an innovative program run by the Ottawa Network for Education that encourages high school students to explore STEM education and careers. The program’s flagship initiative is its Mentor Program, in which teams of high school and elementary school students work together to develop curriculum-based mobile apps with the help of industry mentors. A big part of Maria’s job is “working her network” (of afore-mentioned great friends) to find awesome mentors to participate in the program. Although not a techie by training (she holds a BComm and has just completed her MBA…gasp!), Maria is a geek at heart, having once co-founded a secret DDR society. Her most intimate experience with software engineering was an undergrad elective – Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming – in which she received an A-…in large part thanks to her Extreme Blue interns at the time.

Matt Helm

Developer, Shopify

Matt joined Shopify two years ago as a co-op student. He helped build Shopify's JavaScript MVC Admin in tandem with the client-side framework batman.js. Recently he has worked on building real time dashboards and reporting tools for 80,000 online stores. Matt is passionate about building performant and intuitive UI's to improve the user experience.

Nabil Al-Azem

Software Developer, SAP Labs

Nabil is a computer engineer currently employed at SAP, based in Montreal, Canada with 5 years of experience as a software developer and 2 years in technical support and sales. He recently started participating in local volunteering events such as Games for Hope, which eventually led him to take part in the SAP Social Sabbatical program: a 1 month project in Brazil to help local entrepreneurs and non-profit organizations where he discovered the unique startup scene in Brazil and practiced the Lean Startup Methodology to complete the project.

Nadim Kobeissi

Developer, Cryptocat

Nadim Kobeissi founded Cryptocat, one of the world's most popular encrypted chat apps and an award-winning free and open source software project. His research focuses on making privacy and encryption technology more accessible and easy to use. Nadim is interested in web application engineering, and intersections between cryptography and foreign policy. He currently serves as a special advisor at the New America Foundation's Open Internet Tools Project. Nadim's work has been featured in the New York Times, Wired, TED, and other media.

Nahim Nasser

Vice President of Engineering, BNOTIONS

Nahim Nasser is the Vice President of Engineering at BNOTIONS, overseeing product development. He has a proven track record of leading engineering teams to successfully deliver challenging software products for clients such as eBay/Stubhub, Travelocity, and 500px. Formerly a technical director at BNOTIONS, Nahim’s focus has shifted from leading individual teams to managing the entire engineering body holistically. He specializes in crafting world class teams, and leveraging processes to increase operational efficiency with an emphasis on quality and longevity. Nahim is instrumental in the ongoing evolution and scaling of BNOTIONS’ engineering teams. Driven by his passion to create, Nahim continues to explore new frontiers and trends in software engineering, actively contributing to the open source community. Nahim holds a Bachelor of Engineering, concentrated in Software Engineering from Carleton University in Ottawa.

Tony Hooper

Director of Engineering, Macadamian

Tony's been a web developer since the dawn of time... well not the dawn, but the mid 1990s. Starting his life as a web designer, and migrating into the role of a software architect and now Director of Engineering, responsible for training, mentoring and guiding a team of very talented developers at Macadamian. Recently he's taken a keen interest in Windows 8, Cloud Computing (PaaS mostly) and HTML5 & Mobile computing.

Organizing Team

The students who brought this conference to life.

Alex Selesse
Co-Chair
Matthew Leavitt
Co-Chair
Alex Coco
Co-Director of Logistics
Michael Lakhia
Co-Director of Logistics
Xenia Tay
Webmaster
Samira El-Rayyes
Director of Sponsorship
Bowen Xu
Sponsorship Team
Dominic Charley-Roy
Director of Speakers
Santiago Gil
Director of Promotions
Mohammed Chamma
Director of AV
Danielle Pham
AV Team
Patrick Nguyen
Head Delegate - Concordia University
Kruti Bagde
Head Delegate - Carleton University
Sami Jaber
Head Delegate - McGill University
Saif Myageri
Head Delegate - McMaster University
Aimal Khan
Head Delegate - McMaster University
Jamie Bannerman
Head Delegate - Queen's University
Julian Horvat
Head Delegate - University of Guelph
Stephanie Zeidan
Head Delegate - University of Ottawa
David Kua
Head Delegate - Univesity of Toronto
Alykhan Kanji
Head Delegate - University of Waterloo
Vaughan Hills
Head Delegate - Wilfrid Laurier University
Nataly Sheinin
Head Delegate - York University
Miguel Ocampo-Gooding
Head Delegate - York University

Highlights

Proceedings, photos, and more from this CUSEC.

Visit CUSEC 2014 Site