HSE Winter School SW Engineering

In other circumstances I wouldn’t hesitate to share it, however…

From the 14th to the 18th of February 2022, I had the pleasure to participate in the First International Winter School of Software Engineering organized by HSE.

It was an amazing experience where I had the opportunity to learn from experts on the field from various Universities.

The school included lectures by Bertrand Meyer (Schaffhausen Institute of Technology), Yvonne Dittrich and Helge Pfeiffer (IT University of Copenhagen), Anton Arhipov and Alexander Nozik (JetBrains), Frank Pan (AliExpress Russia), Alexei Lisitsa (University of Liverpool), Sergey Shershakov and Irina Lomazova (HSE University FCS) and other representatives of academia and the industry. The full programme is available here.

The organization of the event (HSE Faculty of Computer Science) far exceeded my expectations for its professionalism. A school group was even created on Slack for participants to share information and experiences.

HSE presents itself in its site as being “ranked as one of Russia’s top universities, HSE University is a leader in Russian education and one of the preeminent economics and social sciences universities in Eastern Europe and Eurasia.”

Obviously, most of the school participants were russian students, however there were many participants from all over the world.

At the end of the event I received my participation certificate and I was ready to share it on social media, when …

On February 24, Putin launched a military invasion of Ukraine.

Given the circumstances, I feel I shouldn’t share this certificate, because the school organizer is a Russian University, and I don’t see so far any statement from this organization condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In the school Slack group, a Russian student apologizes for his country…

I believe the Russian people are not the Russian regime, and Russian students will be the bright future of Russia.