As promised I ran the Micro-talks event at the University of Hull Department of Computer Science Christmas Bash (try saying that 10 times quickly) last week. We had a surprisingly high turn out and a lot of familiar faces got involved! In fact, the room had nearly twice as many people in by the time it filled out as are in the photo above — I counted around 45 in total.
I started us off by managing to throw together a few slides, and talk for a few minutes, about entering the world of open source for the first time. If you found yourself inspired by that you should check out my blog post on the same subject here.
Once I’d finished my bit and introduced the prizes, generously provided by Microsoft, fellow MSP Merrick Sapsford, took the floor to talk about why developing for charities can be a worthwhile endeavour. Merrick develops applications to support a charity which maintains and flies the last XH558 Vulcan Bomber.
Through this work he has managed to make connections with other aviation companies that are giving him paid work, has managed to get into a list of some of the top grossing apps on the iPhone Store and has even managed to get a few free iPhones in the process. You can check out his app here.
Lecturer Rob Miles had a presentation of his own, which included some cool lights which he could change the colour of using the Bluetooth connection from his Windows Phone. You can check out Robs round-up — and considerably better quality photos — on his blog.
Dr. David Grey — who you may remember from such introductory lectures as… — had the unenviable task of following Rob. Dr. Grey spoke about FoodCloud — a multi-platform augmented reality application the university is developing as part of its research into teaching people about how their food is grown and produced. The app seemed like a really cool idea and the implementation was obviously really smooth! It’s a shame we don’t hear more about research within the department (until recently I was under the impression the department did very little)
To finish things up Simon Grey, without the use of even the 4 slides he was allowed, invited everyone to sign up for Global Game Jam 2014. GGJ is a games development competition over 48 hours, like a double length Three Thing Game, which takes place all across the world, starting at 5pm in each time zone. This year Hull will be hosting the biggest individual event in the UK, in a collaboration between The University of Hull, Hull College and the Grimsby Institute. Simons put a lot of work in so if you’re interested you should sign up here.
Overall the event was a success, a lot of people heard and learnt about a lot of cool stuff. Hopefully people were inspired to do something new, and if not at least there was pizza afterwards… 😉 I hope anyone who nabbed a prize enjoyed what they got. The Microsoft-branded lip balm seemed to be a crowd pleaser at any rate. Hopefully we will take what we learnt from this event and try something similar again next semester!
Danny
dannybrown.blog 
2 replies on “Micro-talks Review”
didn’t get told I’d get lip balm for doing one..
You should do it next time, I’ll try and get more skin care products 😉