[ProgSoc] Reflective gratitude by an established ProgSoc member directed squarely towards those that have been of the greatest influence

Roland Turner raz at raz.cx
Fri Dec 18 14:52:26 EST 2009


On 12/18/2009 5:27 AM, Tomislav Bozic wrote:

>>> Our venerable founder, Raz, without whom there'd be no club
>>
>> To be fair, co-founder. Chris Keane was founding president. Tony McGrath
>> who encouraged us to do it (perhaps even suggested it, certainly
>> provided a lot of early assistance) is also due considerable
>> acknowledgement in the "without whom there'd be no club" category.
>>
>
> Oh, you can usurp full credit - where are these guys now anyway? Not like
> they're going to stop you :P

Chris appears to be producing motorbike racing software (zoomius.com).

Tony appears to be consulting; he's the Head Albatross at Wandering 
Albatross Consulting.

> ...so, I'm guessing that ProgSoc was a spin-off society of (the now
> defunct!) CompSoc, but its activities didn't quite match what you wanted

No, that was a common misunderstanding even at the time and required a 
considerable amount of talking with the Union to sort out: they didn't 
even want to let us affiliate because they assumed "programming, must be 
part of Comp. Sci.!". At the time, we had about as many engineering 
students (myself included) as we had computer science students.

I worsened the problem years later by being president of CompSoc and 
[vice-?]president of ProgSoc in the same year. Worse, I ran CompSoc at a 
loss that year which ended up being an unpaid bar-bill to the Union. 
They wanted to extract payment from ProgSoc...

ProgSoc was entirely independent club from the outset, its focus was 
"activity" rather than "social". At the time clubs with the latter label 
spent funds largely on BBQs and alcohol. Maintaining the distinction in 
ProgSoc's reason for existence probably contributed to the reticence to 
spend funds that way.

An aside: Hackerspace.sg treats food and drink as a way to _make_ money, 
rather than a way to spend it. I don't know whether this is feasible for 
ProgSoc.

Wait.... CompSoc is defunct?! Is there a comparable society for 
CompSoc/IT students now?

> in a computer club, so you and your friends founded this club.
>
> ...and Tony was probably either the first Secretary or Treasurer (assuming

No, he was the senior sysadmin with the School of Computing Science 
(roughly what SBG's job used to be); think of him more as mentor and 
sponsor than peer. We learnt a great deal from him.

>> If someone had told me at the time (bear in mind that I was 19) that:
>>
>> - ProgSoc would still be around 20 years later
>
> So it's been around for *more* than half of your life - wow!

Yep, that still feels odd.

- Raz



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