Conference: CUSEC 2008

I have spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday at CUSEC 2008. I have spent Sunday recovering from the intensity and lack of sleep.

I'll spend the next few days blogifying my notes. For now, a few general points:

• There are photos. And under another tag, there are more photos. Also look on lesser photo sharing sites for tags "cusec" and "cusec2008".
  
• Videos were taken of all the talks, which will be uploaded. I will link there when I know where they put them up.
  
• The computers very passionate CS students (that's the kind of crowd you meet at university conferences) buy for themselves are Macs, almost exclusively. It was the exact opposite of the general population, with less than 5 percent non-Macs. These were almost exclusively running something Unixish, in the vast majority of cases (again, about 95%) being Linux.
  I don't know how much that says about the future market for Mac software, though, everybody seems to be writing for the web. That, of course, makes it an awesome time for writing desktop software; going against the crowd is very often good business. Especially because people still seem way more willing to pay directly for desktop software than web sites with a more service-oriented business model.
  The seemingly little competition and easier direct monetization for desktop startups of course also eases going with the classic organic growth business model instead of the highly risky VC-then-buyout thing most quickly-growing web firms seem to do.
• There were lots of women. I don't mean normal lots of women, i.e. > 50%, but computer conference lots of women, like 15% from my guesstimate. I may be overcounting for all the obvious reasons. My point is, there was an amazing lot.
  First the personal thing: Wow, there were female hackers! And they were all really pretty and cute. And they really were girls! And passionate about computing! And really good at it too! Awesome! Women who talk more about perl than pearls! How hot is that! Awesome! Also, I was too shy once again to really hit on any. :(
  My less hormonal point being, wow, IT might be coming out of the sausage fest leper colony camp. Maybe not if more people write things like the paragraph up there, but there is actual hope. That's Awesome! in a totally professional way, because a gender monoculture really is like its stereotype: If there's only women it really gets overly touchy-feely and non-competitive and things don't get done; but if there's only men — and IT is still more or less there — it's even worse. Questions of fact become questions of ego, there's endless dick size wars over objective measurements (if measurements get done and it's not just chest beating over every decision), and the whole culture tends to be brash and macho. More women could be the very, very, very best thing ever to happen to software.
  So, yay! Thanks for being there, females of the species!
• The whole conference was totally fantastic. Thanks guys! I had the best time ever.
  It's really sad that I would never flown in for this if I had been back in Europe because it was "small", but I had an even better time than back at LISA05 and that despite the very, very non-SoCal weather. Go to small conferences, people!