Thursday 8 April 2010
Upcoming Events
My next couple of weeks are going to be rather busy with public speaking engagements...
Tomorrow afternoon I'm going to be on a panel at the ASWEC 2010 software engineering conference at Massey in Auckland. The panel's about "Engineering Software For Economic Growth", which sounds like it could be boring but I'll try to liven it up :-). I'll claim that although most software development is repetitive and lends itself to predictable engineering-style processes, innovative projects are more inventive and inherently less predictable, and the latter are more economically desirable in the long run.
On Monday I'll be down at Victoria University in Wellington to give a talk on "API Design For The Masses". This will be about what we've learned designing and implementing Web specs. Designing formats, protocols and APIs that will be used by millions of people (e.g. HTML) poses fundamentally new requirements over designing for an audience of hundreds or thousands of people (e.g. TCP/IP). Another title for this talk could be "Extending The Web Platform For Dummies".
On Tuesday through Thursday I'm going to be at the New Zealand Computer Science Student Research Conference in Wellington. I'll be mostly offline during this time. On Tuesday morning I'll give a talk about "changing the world". This will be an exhortation for people to apply their computer science skills to solve interesting problems that matter --- encouraging them to avoid the pitfalls of boring corporate software development and futile ivory-tower research. I want to demolish the idea of "academia versus industry": you can do boring work, or interesting work, in either environment. Problem selection is everything.
On Wednesday the following week I'm going down to the University of Waikato to give a talk on Kingitanga Day. This talk will be a variant of the previous talk, with more of a focus on working in open source communities to change the world, especially in the context of Mozilla.
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