October 08, 2009, 10:19 AM — 'You near the US Midwest next weekend? You have an opportunity to catch one of the outstanding live events for computing students: the Fifteenth Annual Reflections|Projections the ACM at the U of I hosts. This is a great value for students: out-of-pocket costs are barely positive, the intellectual atmosphere intense, and the perspectives rich and far different from what you're likely to encounter in daily life. Classroom experience too-often narrows; it can be hard for students swimming in the sea of daily homework and lectures to grasp how provincial their curriculum is. Commercial internships add a dimension--but perhaps only one. The speakers at a Conference like this one, though, are, in general, cosmopolites: they're accustomed to connecting computing ideas across all sorts of intriguing domains. If you've ever wondered, "What's the point?", this is a chance to chat with folks who've at least thought a lot about the question. This year's line-up includes a co-founder of Reddit, the JSON developer, a Subversion developer, head of the Distance Lab, and authors of several books you'll recognize.
I fully recognize, by the way, that all the invited speakers at this year's Reflections|Projections are men who look more-or-less like me. There's an issue in that that we'll have to agree to explore later.
We all know we live in a connected-blogging-Facebooking-Tweeting-IMing... world. Not all the value is in the new forms, though. While Conferences and books and other older forms have unquestionably retreated in importance, a few of them still deserve your attention. "Reflections|Projections" is one.
gdb is another. This twenty-year-old debugger matters to you, whether you realize it or not. I'm the ideal person to explain this, too, because I sometimes go years without using it! That's why I'll spend the next week pointing out what you should know about Tuesday's 7.0 release. Check back here at Smart Development tomorrow for the first in a series of tips on what gdb can mean to you.
