CUSEC 2020

CUSEC 2020 was held in Montreal January 2020. Welcoming 450+ Canadian students to hear from renown speakers such as Mayuko Inoue, Puneet Mulchandani, Kristina Balaam, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Maude Lemaire, Kate Arthur, and many, many more!

Speakers & Presentations

The voices that took the stage at this CUSEC.

Puneet Mulchandani

Taming Chaos: Life as a Product Manager

What do product managers do? What role do they play on software development teams? Can chaos really be tamed? We'll talk through the basics of product management, the value that PM's bring to teams, how to use PM's as a resource, and ways to pursue a career in product management. Puneet Mulchandani is an engineer-turned-product manager who loves solving meaningful problems. He's built and scaled up teams, worked on a variety of complex software and business problems, and even co-founded a tech startup. He led the product and engineering teams at GuestDriven (acquired in 2016), and currently works as the product management lead at Stack Overflow on their Advertising and Talent products. In his spare time, you'll find him playing music, binge-watching videos about space, or on an airplane.

Kate Gregory

Emotional Code

Programmers, it turns out, are human beings. This means they not only feel emotions, they leave traces of those emotions behind in their code. Kate will show you why that is so, and what you can do about it. I have been paid to program for over 40 years now, and it's almost all been in C++. I code, teach, write, and help people, from an office in rural Ontario. You can take my courses on Pluralsight or watch my talks at conferences the world over. I'm also active in #include <C++>, trying to make the C++ community more welcoming and inclusive.

Toria Gibbs

How Search Engines Work: A Thing I Didn't Learn in University

You probably learned about databases in university, but did you learn about search engines? The search bar is the most important feature of many websites... and yet most people don't know how it really works! Toria Gibbs didn't know how search engines work either, until she landed a job doing search infrastructure. In this talk, we'll learn the basic implementation of a search engine, how search engines can outperform databases in some ways, and what trade-offs were made to achieve this fast performance. Toria Gibbs is a Senior Software Engineer on the Search Platform team at Shopify. She is interested in back-end development, distributed systems, information retrieval, cloud platforms, and container orchestration. Toria holds a computer science degree from the University of Waterloo. In her spare time, Toria bakes cookies and plays the bassoon in a wind orchestra.

Mayuko Inoue

Finding Your Way Through the Tech Industry: A Letter to My Former Self

Navigating the tech industry can be daunting - it's more competitive than ever, and it's growing at a rapid rate. In the format of a letter to my former self - a college student trying to find her way through the tech industry - I'll share lessons and insights I've learned and things I wish I knew as a college student. Mayuko Inoue is a second generation Japanese American from San Diego, CA living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works as a Senior iOS Software Engineer at a large tech company in Silicon Valley, and has worked in the tech industry since 2012, at companies like Intuit and Patreon. She makes Youtube videos and online content about what it's like to live as a Software Engineer living in Silicon Valley.

Phillip Williams

Machine Learning in the Cloud

Kinaxis offers many Machine Learning products such as time series forecasting. The problem is that we have so much data that it can't all be processed on one machine. This talk will explore the challenges that come with data of that size, the tools and architecture to solve these problems as well as the current state of this niche in the Python ecosystem. Phil is an Ottawa based Software Developer who completed his undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Chemical Engineering at the University of Ottawa. At his current role at Kinaxis, Phil is using Big Data, Cloud Technologies and Distributed Computing to build the next generation of Automatic Machine Learning and Time Series Forecasting.

Erica Engle

All about perspective: A deep dive into view creation on iOS and how to make the best choice for your next app

iOS application development relies on many things, but one of those is how to create views for your users to interact with content in your app. Developers can choose xibs, storyboards, or programmatic style for view creation. We'll dive into the pros and cons of each as well as give some tips when strategizing where to start. Erica is a current Senior Software Engineer at Slack Technologies. She is on the Enterprise team as an iOS engineer at Slack where she works on features such as Enterprise Mobility Management, Single Sign On, and Enterprise Key Management. Erica graduated from the University of Southern California. When she is not spending her time working on apps she's running marathons and taking walks with her dog, Eddie!

Kate Arthur

The critical role that AI education will play in creating a fair and inclusive world

AI influences the world around us, from the posts we see on social media to our assignment grades - even our credit scores. But education is struggling to keep up. In this talk, Kate Arthur, CEO of KCJ, will outline the roles that AI systems play in daily life and how these developments could be used to meet the UN's Sustainable Development Goals deadline of 2030. Kate Arthur is the founder and CEO of Kids Code Jeunesse (KCJ), a national charity determined to give every Canadian child access to digital skills education. In 2019, KCJ launched #kids2030, an initiative to educate kids and educators on artificial intelligence, ethics, and on using technology to achieve the UN's Sustainable Development Global Goals by 2030.

Maude Lemaire

10 Things You Should Know Before Refactoring Anything

Slack strives to makes people's working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive. This is the tale of multiple refactoring efforts and the many lessons learned in attempts to boost application performance and company-wide developer productivity. You'll walk away knowing the critical when, why, and how of a successful refactor. Maude is a Staff Software Engineer at Slack Technologies Inc., based out of San Francisco. In her time at Slack, she's worked as a product engineer, a performance engineer, and on the infrastructure team making sure other backend engineers at Slack are as productive as possible. Prior to Slack, Maude was a front-end software engineer at Rent the Runway in New York City. Maude holds a BSc. in Software Engineering from McGill University in Montreal, QC.

Forest Anderson

Cultivating a Healthy Open Source Community

Veloren is an open source multiplayer game written in Rust, with aesthetics similar to Minecraft. Since it is an open source project, it needs strong and healthy development practices. This talk will go over Veloren's techniques that will work for any project, including release cycles, decentralized design, public outreach, and talent acquisition. Forest is a student who enjoys making games and running security competitions. He co-leads Hack All The Things and the Lame Jam. He is the meta lead on the Veloren project, focusing on CI and community development. He is a Carleton University computer science student with honours in game development, CTO of Timsle, and has done research in the Graphics, Images and Games Lab at Carleton.

Megan Doherty

The Soft Skills in Software: Branding Yourself as a Technical Person

From co-op dropout to Startup Director to Technical Account Manager at Microsoft, Megan will explore how branching out into different avenues in tech by leveraging soft skill abilities and good old fashioned hustle can lead you to the career you envision. This speech will highlight opportunities that co-op may not give you, that GPA isn't as relevant in a real life context, and how building your brand as a technical person is as important as ever. Megan is a Technical Account Manager for Microsoft based in Toronto and recent software engineering graduate from the University of New Brunswick. Previously a Director for a start-up, she understands the value in leveraging Microsoft solutions in education. As an artist and a software engineer, she's always wondered why the gap between technology and creativity was so large.

Nicolas Cuillery

Mobile Development is The Worst (I love it!)

Being a mobile developer has always led to strategic questioning about your career. Should you specialize in iOS or Android, or invest time and effort in both? This talk will explain the state of mobile development, give insights about career choices, and raise a desire to put a foothold in the challenging but rewarding mobile development world. Nicolas is a software developer. Graduated in electronic 10 years ago from the French engineering school CPE-Lyon, he has worked his way up to a CTO position in the Canadian branch of Zenika. As a CTO, he helps both the company and its employees shine on technical aspects. As a consultant, he advises and helps companies overcome their challenges.

Kristina Balaam

Careers in Cybersecurity: The jobs you never knew you wanted

Cybersecurity is one of the fastest growing and understaffed industries in tech. And yet, as students, many of us were never exposed to the exciting career opportunities it offers! In this talk, we'll discuss possible career paths, what a role in cybersecurity is really like, and how students can get started pursuing a career in infosec. Kristina Balaam is a Security Intelligence Engineer at Lookout where she reverse-engineers mobile malware. Prior to Lookout, she worked as an Application Security Engineer at Shopify focusing mostly on Android mobile security. Kristina graduated with a bachelor's of computer science from McGill University in 2012, and is currently pursuing a MSc. in information security engineering from the SANS Institute of Technology.

Jackie Chi Kit Cheung

Artificial Intelligence in the Wild: Challenges and Opportunities

I will discuss the challenges and opportunities of deploying AI techniques in settings where they are expected to interact with humans or make decisions that have impact on people's lives. I will present a brief overview of how current state-of-the-art methods work, success stories, and challenges related to unpredictability. Jackie Chi Kit Cheung is an Assistant Professor at McGill University's School of Computer Science, where he co-directs the Reasoning and Learning Lab, and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Mila Research Institute. His research focuses on computational methods for understanding text and generating language that is fluent and useful in context.

Angelo Pengue

Device Monitoring, Visualisation, and Alerting with the TICK stack and Grafana

TICK stack is an open source project offered by InfluxData. These tools specialize in helping acquire and store time series data from devices, sensors, or anything that emits data. This talk will walk through setting up the TICK stack to gather and store device metrics, visualize them on Grafana, and trigger alerts. Angelo Pengue is a Software Developer at DRW, where he and his team provide software solutions to network teams varying from operational integrity to business administration. He has a Bachelor of Software Engineering from Concordia University. In his free time, Angelo enjoys playing soccer, taking improv classes, aviation and racing simulation, and learning about personal development.

André Gauthier

The Future of 3D Real-Time Tools

The world's most popular real-time 3D platform, Unity provides tools for creators of all kinds to bring their ideas to life. Unity powers over 50% of the world's mobile games, more than 60% of VR and AR content, and is fast expanding into markets from architecture and engineering to automotive to film. Andre Gauthier has been working in the real-time 3D industry for the last 30 years. He started his career as a cofounder of Kaydara, the creator of the Academy Award-winning software MotionBuilder. Andre joined Unity six years ago and helped found the Montreal office of Unity Technologies, where he acts as the Montreal studio head and vice-president of authoring tools and technologies.

Abdou Sarr

The Future of Computational Photography

The world of media is rapidly evolving. As our devices develop more immersive capabilities our demand for photos to escape their current constraints grows larger. In this talk we will discuss the growing innovation of cameras on mobile devices, and the software trends including AI and AR that will impact the future. Abdou Sarr is a fourth year CS student at Carleton University and currently the co-founder of MODU. At MODU he works on bringing what users see in the real world closer to what they see on their mobile devices with immersive capture technologies. Before MODU, Abdou worked as a software engineering intern at companies including Shopify, Canopy Growth Corporation and Motorola Labs.

Princejeet Singh Sandhu

Coding for Coders

There are always two aspects of programming a solution. One is to implement a solution that gets the desired result. Second is to implement a solution that is easy to maintain. This talk talks about practices that make code easy to change. Princejeet is a Software Developer at Shopify, working in the Merchandising team. His curiosity and zeal to solve problems attracts him to backend systems, data retrieval, and distributed systems. When he is not coding or watching Netflix, he spends his time eating, biking, reading or doing some other outdoor activity.

Organizing Team

The students who brought this conference to life.

Laura Wheatley
Head Delegate - Universities in Montreal
Michael Walz
Head Delegate - University of New Brunswick
Ellen Li
Head Delegate - University of Ottawa
Hamna Nimra Manzoor
Head Delegate - Carleton University
Liam Walsh
Head Delegate - Queen's University
Ida Liu
Head Delegate - University of Toronto
Hrayr Mkrtchyan
Head Delegate - University of Guelph
Isham Singh Behl
Head Delegate - University of Manitoba
Ayush Kapur
Head Delegate - University of Waterloo

Highlights

Proceedings, photos, and more from this CUSEC.

Visit CUSEC 2020 Site