Over the last couple days I was fortunate enough to attend the CIPS {Canadian Information Processing Society} 2010 Spring Seminar and had a very good time.  Highlights for me included meeting up with some previous students of mine (lab and class) as well as meeting some new folks but also the very inspirational talks that were had, espeically by Jesse Wilson from Google, David Gerhard from the U of Regina, and Michael Geist from the U of Ottawa. 

What hit me the most during the 2-day event was the fact that I need to become more engaged with what I am a proponent of.  As those who actually read this awesome blogosphere of mine {ha}, know that I am very much a proponent of open source technologies.  I use open source software as alternatives to mainstream softwares whenever possible.  I do this because open source provides the most choice for me personally, gives me the freedom to customize and personalize my experiences, among other things.  I am also a fan of the atmosphere/environment of open source, where we have communities of developers and users all working together for something good.  It's just awesome!

That said, I can, and see that I should do more than just spew my beliefs and ideologies.  What I am trying to say here is that I am a computer scientist.  I love computers; teaching and doing research and coming up with design concepts is really what I want to do in this life.  In this respect though I am very much a front-end designer of things, the GUI {graphical user interface} is my focus, i.e. what you see and do when you interact with a program.  This involves developing lo/hi-fidelity prototypes and testing designs with users, seeing what works and what doesn't and improving accordingly.  This I love!  What has been lacking lately though is the back-end programming experiences that are also very much an integral part of the whole teaching, research, and design process.  Jesse Wilson's seminars, which both talked about Google; one about Google Android {open source mobile goodness} and the other about being a software engineer at Google, and David Gerhard's seminar, which talked about alternatives to mainstream software solutions, really brought this aspect to light for me. Specifically, Jesse talked about the beauty of code and the power of it in the development of something, and the feeling one gets from contributing with a team the necessary bits and bites that actually comprise a product.  I had somewhat forgotten this aspect along my academic and industry journey {totally non-existent in my industry experiences thus far}.  I've been viewing coding as a necessary step, albeit somewhat a secondary one.  Really, when I think about it now after Jesse's and David's talks, I see now that it's just as important as the research and design of things {I knew this before, maybe just had forgotten it a tad}.

What I'm really trying to say is that I need to start getting my hands dirty again, back to delving into code.  Now don't get me wrong, in my experiences as a web designer and web system administrator, I've kept up my experiences in code; scripting here and there {ugly scripting no less}, but I think I really need to delve more into writing beautiful code.  Jesse's and David's very inspirational talks have led me to map out a plan which will have me getting more engaged, doing {aka Yodda}, planning the development of code-rich projects in my future {both in Android and other platform environments, bigger web stuffs and other}, more than just what I am planning for my PhD work.

Now, the linkages back to open source, how I started this whole blog posting.  Instead of just being a proponent and user of open source technologies, I see, and now feel the need to start contributing back.  I need to be more engaged in the actual coding/design/research of open source tools, espeically the ones I use daily.  Perhaps I could start by contributing to the documentation side of things {maybe with Drupal or Ubuntu}, leading into something more substantial like contributing code.  Truth of the matter is that I am in a position to contribute so the question is why am I not?  Thank you Jesse and David for giving me that spark of inspiration! -tMac

{PS: To be posted later is my experiences listening to the discussions on fair copyright by Michael Geist, who was also a highlight of the 2010 Spring Seminar.  However, that really deserves it's own post as it is a very important issue and Michael Geist is the leading expert.  His talks were also both educational and very inspiring indeed}