The Quixotic Engineer

Yesterday marked the end of CUSEC 2008, a three day software engineering conference for Canadian university students. While the conference has been going annually since 2002, this was my first year attending. I had initially planned to be quasi-live blogging the whole thing, but I hadn’t realized how busy the three days were going to be. Instead, here’s a quick recap of some of the terrific people I heard from at CUSEC.

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Every Sunday in the summer, hundreds of people gather around the statue of Sir George-Étienne Cartier on Mount Royal. The assembly doesn’t have an official name, but it’s called the Tam-Tams by most. The focus of the event is the drum circle, a free-style jam where anyone can bring a hand-drum and start playing along; it’s not unusual to see over a hundred drummers at one time. The rest come to listen to the music, dance, play some hacky sack or frisbee and just enjoy the great outdoors.

Along with the Jazz Fest (which I wrote about earlier), the Tam-Tams are part of a complete summer experience in Montreal. The event has a great vibe, Mount Royal park is beautiful, and overall it’s quite possibly my favourite use of a Sunday. If you’re ever in the city, do yourself a favour and check it out.

• Tam-Tams in Montreal site
• Google Map of the park

Montreal is a fantastic city in the summer; it has four universities downtown, a great selection of bars, clubs and venues, and a fairly unique mix of English, French, and a thousand other languages. With the F1, Just For Laughs, Francofolies and (most importantly) The Montreal Jazz Festival in town, there is no shortage of fun things to do.

I got to sample three of my personal favorites iconic Montreal institutions yesterday, so I figured I’d write about them:

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