My first duty? A blast from the past

Today was a blast.

And not just one from the past.

Stepping back in time and returning to Plymouth University for a guest lecture with Computer Science students was super fun. It always is. Seeing the lights in their eyes come on when something clicks is a dopamine hit I dearly miss.

But this time, it was a little different. . .

I wasn’t delivering the session as an introduction to me. I’m not the person who’d be coaching the co-hort through turning software ideas into a product realities. Instead, one of the teams will be turning a Sapphire Holidays need into something tangible. We need reporting tooling for the new era, one built for future goals, and not something bolted onto a legacy product.

These are the folks to do it.

The session delivered was given through the lens of entrepreneurship.

How do you frame a problem into something you can research, ideate around, find a market, and test early. Early enough to avoid writing a single line of code until you know where the value is. After all, writing quality software very quickly gets expensive.

And when you are ready, how can .NET and the tooling around it help you to move quickly in a startup context. They were super happy to find out about the generous free allowances that Azure gives to try out the platform.

But my favorite moment had to be when the fear became clear in their eyes.

Anyone who’s seen me on stage will know I like a little bit of crowd participation. Well. . . they had had enough of participating come the end of the session. It pushes many out of their comfort zone, which is a good thing in most instances. But it always gets them talking to new people, which is the point. When you’re turning a problem into a product idea, you need to chat to people who have the problem.

Not always the easiest thing in the world for a comp sci student.

For me, delivering my first session where I can say I am a Microsoft MVP was pretty special.

It was a goal I started working towards whilst lecturing at the uni, set as part of a term long project in taking steps incremental steps towards achieving something. The classes goal was to build a game. Mine was to become an MVP. We all went through the exercises together.

It turns out the methods I taught in those workshops really do work.

Who’d have thunk it 🤷‍♂️