Everything CUSEC

Some people have been asking myself and other organizers, ‘What does the theme for 2008 mean?’. Hugo Levasseur, my Co-Chair for 2008, did a much better job at explaining this than me, so I share with you his thoughts.

What or who inspired this theme?

Towards the end of CUSEC 2007, I was able to spare a few moments to have my copy of “The Pragmatic Programmer” signed by our beloved Keynote speaker for 2007: David Thomas. His dedication reads as follows: “Above all make it fun!”. The first thing that came to my mind when I read the dedication was: “Had I managed to help make CUSEC 2007 fun?”. My fears quickly vanished; the feed-back we got told me that we, the CUSEC organizing committee, succeeded in this. The second thing that came to my mind was that this dedication would make a great theme! That is, I thought that all actors of the software world: the hardcore basement hackers, the emailing grandmas, the CIO’s of multinationals, and the software engineers should all be having fun! That is why I suggested “Making it fun!” as our theme for this year.

So what does it mean?

Simply put, it means “Enhancing the user experience”. Where user can be the end-user, the student, the developer, the business owner,… in other words: a stakeholder in the Software Engineering product lifecycle.

Now, this is what the theme represents to us, the organizing committee. It is meant to be open to interpretation, so that you may take away from it what you feel you need.