In my new life I seem to be hanging round the universities a lot. I was never a stranger as such when I was working at Durham but since then I find myself in all sorts of events at Newcastle, Northumbria and Sunderland University. I am off to Teesside in the new year as well.
I have been involved in some lecturing, if you can call it that at Newcastle and Sunderland, as well as some video work for Northumbria, yet in the main it is through Dynamo that much of the contact comes.
The most recent was no exception with the latest Dynamonet event held at the new Urban Sciences Building at Newcastle University. As it happens I had been there only the previous week to talk about a Low Power Wide Area Network but that is for another blog.
The Dynamonet events are held monthly, immediately after the board meeting and is a chance for people in the industry to meet and learn about things that are going on in tech. The Urban Sciences Building owes a fair bit to Dynamo, not in a financial sense but more that we, as a group, could demonstrate a willingness across the North East to get behind such a project.
I got a chance to speak to some of the students who blew my head away with the work they were involved in. Whenever I meet up with those studying at college I wish that I could roll back time and do my studies again. There are so many interesting things to get involved in and I feel that somehow I wasted my university experience all those years ago.
The problem is now though that I don’t think I would be clever enough to get in. The students these days are working on problems that are right at the edge of my comprehension. I talked to someone about running objects across multiple servers which I didn’t get, he mentioned the word aura (I might as well have been in one), and another about using multiple datasets to predict when those with diabetes would be unwell. I was on to that one.
The third was about the automated management of data traffic across linked servers to allow for the flexing of demand. These students had been invited to talk to Twitter about this and so it must be impressive. I talked to him about a possible blockchain application here and that seemed to go down well.
The world of tech is so exciting with so many different angles to get involved in, if only I was young and clever enough to make the grade. Perhaps I am an imposter after all.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 