We were invited to present a guest lecture (2hrs) at QUT today on Web Applications in the Real World. Our brief – show some cool demos and tell some stories about working in the real world.
We had some short notice on the request and at first freaked at the thought of coming up with 2 hours of content and then I thought back to uni and how lecturers that faltered were treated…lot of paper planes thrown at them while they talked. I compounded my worry further when I thought of a presentation I saw to uni students last year where the presenter made a bad choice of words and was eaten alive on stage.
But hey, it's a great excuse to get out of the house and we love an excuse to show cool stuff.
So we rocked up and pulled out some of our cool demos (well we think they're cool). We showed some Virtual Earth, Live Services, Deep Zoom, new Features in Visual Studio 2008..and that's about how far we got before we ran out of time. We didn't even make it to SQL Spatial! I was impressed at the number of students who had 1. heard of Virtual Earth and 2. Used it. We got some really interesting questions from the audience, nobody threw planes or walked out during our 2 hour talk-fest. We got some great reactions to some of the Virtual Earth features, which shows those who think “Maps are so 2001” may be wrong. So in summary, I think it went well.
It's great to see the students are getting exposed to relevant, real-world languages like .Net 2.0 and some have already used 3.5 framework.