I’ll write something a little more detailed later this week about the competitions themselves, but for now here’s a weekend in pictures
You may think that the “big event” this weekend is happening down in Austin, Texas. However, the hippest of the hip know that the REAL place to be is scenic Sherbrooke, Quebec.
This evening I was graciously invited by a friend to attend the 3rd Montreal Girl Geek Dinner. Boy geeks such as myself were welcome as the guest of a girl geek. The goal of the event is described as follows:
Montreal Girl Geek Dinners are an offshoot of the London Girl Geek Dinners, started by Sarah Blow. The goal of these get-togethers is to make technology accessible and interesting to all age groups and all people, particularly women.
These monthly events are aimed at providing a welcoming atmosphere and a platform for learning in an informal environment. They are always held in pubs, bars or restos and there is usually a speaker (or several) who talk for a short while on a chosen subject for the evening.
The event lasted 3-4 hours, a large part of which was spent eating and networking. I had a chance to speak with the organizer Tanya McGinnity as well as Peter Yang, a designer at Ubisoft Montreal. The attendees came from many different backgrounds; some were programmers and web designers, others were just self-described geeks. In the spirit of making these events accessible, the speakers avoid getting too technical.
→ 2 Comments
Canada · Feminism
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.
Inspired partially by xkcd and partially by testimony from other programmers, I’ve decided to take up learning Python in my spare time. I’ve been using the free e-book Dive Into Python as a reference, and it’s been an interesting experience so far (whitespace for code blocks!?)
I was showing the Python Shell to my friend Thomas the other day, and he typed in a few equations to try it out. While “2+2” and “3*8” resolved normally, “2^3”, which is a standard notation for two raised to the third power, returned “1”. We were a bit confused, but decided that the caret symbol “^” must mean something else in Python. We entered a few more formulas in an attempt to discover what the symbol meant, and here are the results:
