CUSEC 2016

Carina C. Zona

Founder of CallbackWomen

Consequences of an insightful algorithm

Carina is a developer, advocate, dev evangelist, and educator who is passionate about getting people to examine our many preconceptions that underly everyday programming. She is also the founder of CallbackWomen, and a certified sex educator.

Kate Heddleston

Software Engineer

So what exactly does it mean to be a "Software Engineer"?

Kate Heddleston is a software engineer from San Francisco who loves building web applications and programming in python. She studied computer science for her Master's degree, and studied Communication and Human-Computer Interacton for her undergraduate degree. Kate enjoys using open source tools to build web applications and especially likes building portions of the product that interface with the user.

Michael Bernstein

Developer, Code Climate

I'd like to introduce you to some of my closest friends

Michael R. Bernstein (@mrb_bk) loves you. He lives in Takoma Park, MD and spends most of his time thinking about pottery, obscure LPs, food, and the intersection of philosophy and Computer Science.

Jeff Hodges

Software Engineer, Let's Encrypt

The conditions around free green locks

Jeff Hodges has spent the past six years working in adversarial and distributed systems. He's the author of "Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods". He previously worked at Twitter where he shipped HTTP, anti-spam, search, and other systems. and was featured in the New York Times for his work on forward secrecy. Most recently, he's helped launch Let's Encrypt, a joint effort between Mozilla, the EFF, and others to make a free, non-profit CA.

Julia Evans

Software Engineer, Stripe

Reading your computer's mind

Julia Evans thinks you can be a wizard programmer! She lives in Montreal, blogs about programming at jvns.ca, and works at Stripe on the machine learning team.

Alex Selesse

Modern software engineering in practice

Alex Selesse is a software engineering graduate from McGill University in Montreal. He spent 2 years working for a big corporation before switching to a much smaller company with only 4 other developers. He's been involved in several CUSECs; he was co-chair in 2014. Alex's areas of interest include code readability, automation and continuous delivery. His talk is based on his professional experience with continuous delivery, with an emphasis on the challenges associated with process improvement. In his spare time, Alex likes contributing to open source, reading books, tracking stats, writing on his blog, refining his dotfiles and rock climbing.

Dann Toliver

Visualizing process evolution

Dann enjoys building things, like programming languages, databases, distributed systems, communities of smart friendly humans, and pony castles with his two year old.

Julie Haché

HARDER BETTER FASTER STRONGER: A practical guide to self-improvement

Julie is a software developer who somehow discovered that she’s really into teaching and helping people improve. This led her on a journey to fight her fear of public speaking by becoming an instructor at a coding school and eventually became CTO. More recently, she’s rejoined Shopify to head up the Onboarding team, where she continues her quest to create amazing learning and growth experiences. Julie attended her first CUSEC in 2005 and went on to help organize it for many years. #cusecog

Laurie Hendren

Professor, McGill University

Compilers in your pockets

Professor Laurie Hendren leads the Sable Research Group at McGill University. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Queen's University, Canada and her Ph.D. from Cornell. She has been a professor at McGill since 1990, was made an ACM Fellow in 2010, was awarded a Canada Research Chair in Compiler Tools and Techniques in 2011, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2012. The Sable Research Group has previously designed and implemented Soot and associated tools for the analysis and transformation of Java. For the last five years the group has been developing McLAB, a framework for compiling and executing MATLAB and extensions of MATLAB. In addition, she is currently part of a multi-disciplinary team developing domain-specific lanaguages and tools for patients and physicians in radiation oncology.

Prakash Panangaden

Professor, McGill University

Automated verification: is it for real?

Prakash Panangaden was born in Pune, India. He received a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee under the supervision of Leonard Parker. His PhD thesis was on renormalization of interacting fields in curved spacetime. He joined the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University in 1985 as an Assistant Professor, where he worked in the Nuprl project. He moved to McGill University as an associate professor in the School of Computer Science in 1990 and was promoted to professor in 1996. His research has covered programming languages, type theory, concurrency theory, dataflow programming, probabilistic systems, automata theory. He has also worked in pure mathematics and in theoretical physics. Prakash has successfully graduated 14 PhD students and has in total 32 descendants. He has been keynote speaker at many conferences, including the two top conferences in the field -- LICS [7] and ICALP. He is on the editorial boards of 6 journals. In 2013 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Candada.

Simon Eskildsen

Production Engineer, Shopify

Reliable software in a chaotic world

When Simon's not researching walruses or playing chaos monkey for the company's infrastructure, he's hard at work taming the wildlife of production, protecting Shopify from flash sales, scale, misbehaving resources and itself. Other than that, as a new resident of Canada, fulfilling his obligation to call everyone out when they think they've experienced "cold weather".

Josh Matthews

Software Developer, Mozilla

How to read unfamiliar code

Josh is a software developer at Mozilla. He fixes crashes in Firefox, helps build a new web browser called Servo (using the new language called Rust), and mentors many volunteer developers for both projects. He sings in a barbershop quartet, and gets really excited about making open source projects accessible to new contributors!

Robin Grosset

Software Engineer, IBM

Futures in big data and artificial intelligence

Robin Grosset is an IBM Distinguished Engineer based in the IBM Ottawa Lab in Canada. Robin has a track record as an entrepreneur having worked in and founded successful software startups which resulted in him joining IBM in 2008 through an acquisition. Robin has over 20 years commercial experience in the field of Business Analytics and he is currently technical lead and architect for Watson Analytics a groundbreaking cognitive analytics system. Robin holds a first class honours degree in both Physics and Computing Science from the University of Newcastle in the UK.

Lucille Hua

Student, McGill

It's time for a new web

Lucille Hua is a fourth year student at McGill University, majoring in software engineering and minoring in music technology. You may know her as a software engineer at YouTube, Google, VP External for CS Undergraduate Society, McHacks board of directors, Secretariat of SSUNS 2014, web developer for numerous sites and a keen researcher. She has deep interests in computer networks, web traffic optimizations, as well as video streaming technology, video codecs, and music tech. She has put hours of work into these fields, and she is looking forward to share it with all of you. Besides her nerdy sides, she is also a seventeen-year ballet dancer, a ten-year guitarist, a singer and composer, and a travelholic.

Fiona Condon

Software Engineer, Etsy

Nice docs finish first: search ranking for fairness at Etsy

Fiona Condon is a senior software engineer on the search ranking team at Etsy. She works to make Etsy’s vast marketplace easy and fun to explore, with a focus on internationalization. She's a one-time Vancouverite living in Brooklyn and she enjoys reading, eating and tweeting.

Daniel Lanthier

Development Manager, Macadamian

Why shouldn't your house plant be allowed to tweet?

Daniel is a Development Manager at Macadamian Technologies and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering from University of Ottawa. Daniel has over 10 years of experience in development, from application servers to mobile applications. Dan also coaches high school students on how to write applications. When Daniel isn’t in front of a computer, you can find him in the country, and/or preparing a delicious meal.

Nathan Powell

Network Programmer, Ubisoft Montreal

Pitfalls of peer-to-peer networking in games

Nathan Ross Powell (@nathanross) is currently a network programmer for Ubisoft Montreal working on an unannounced title. He is from Middlesbrough in the North East of England, has a degree in Computer Games Software Engineering from Northumbria University and over eight years of professional experience in the games industry. Nathan’s latest video game credit was on Watch_Dogs where he looked after online gameplay, engine replication and first party technical requirements (Microsoft, Sony). In addition to his passion for building connected experiences and modern C++ techniques, Nathan makes and programs mechanical keyboards, snowboards during the long winter, and is slowly working his way through Montreal's impressive selection of craft beers.