Day 1 was absolutely amazing. Somehow, I really don't know how, every year CUSEC outdoes itself each and every year I go to it.

This year is the first I don't go as a student. This year I'm a "corporate attendee". All that really means is that I have to stand around my company's booth during the "career fair" hour of the day. On that note, the career fair got a lot better this year. Two years ago CUSEC had 3 companies present. Last year maybe 6 or 7. This year there's probably a dozen or more. So that's great for people looking for jobs.

This year I'm going to try a different format. Last year I wrote a separate post for each presentation I attended. This year I'll try to sum up a day in a post. Hopefully it won't ramble too much. If I find it does I might split it up later.

So, Day 1. Day 1 saw Tim Bray and Zed Shaw as keynotes. Both were amazing but more about them later. First, I'd like to talk about the academic presentation given by Marsha Chechik. Her presentation was about software verification. Software verification is something that I would never see myself investing time in because personally, it seems like very little return on investment for me. I'm selfish. But I'm really happy that some people invest time in it because it shows amazing promise for the future of software. Now I honestly don't see any major advances from this field but the incremental advances are quite obvious so I imagine that by 2020 you'll easily be able to go home and, while sleeping, have an automatically generated test suite run over your program on one box and have a verifier like the one Dr. Chechik is building on another.

From what I understood, the software she's building basically abstracts out your program to a basic skeleton of itself and tries to reason on it. If the skeleton doesn't have enough information to decide anything or seems fine, they then add more information again and run the process again, looking for errors. As Dijkstra said (and Dr. Chechik quoted): "Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence." So while these techniques will never absolutely produce perfect software, I believe they'll get us a whole lot closer.

I realize now that my idea of summarizing an entire day in a single post was misguided. Way tltr (too long to read). So coming soon: Tim Bray speaking about hard problems in Computer Science and Zed Shaw being so fucking awesome.