One of the things that I love about being in the developer comminity is that I get the chance to (hopefully) get people excited about software development.

Whenever I take to the stage to talk about my favorite technologies, or ways of working, my whole goal is to try and show what is possible and hopefully inspire someone to give it a try.

When a friend from DeltaN asked me if I would be interested to give a guest lecture at their DevOps course at the Haagse Hoogschool I jumped at the chance!

Back in December 2024 I was invited to give a lecture for the second time - talking about pair programming:

• How it can go wrong
• Ways to make it go right
• Some of the benefits that you get it right

It's a subject close to my heart, after seeing work really well, and also seeing it kind of not 😅 And whilst I know that there are some opposing views on this, I have found that when you can make it work, you can really make the team better than the sum of their indivudual skills.

Getting the chance to share my learnings and experience with students, whilst they were still learing, was a huge honour - I'm so happy that I got the chance to do it!

Even if speaking to a group of about 50 students is so much more nervewracking than speaking to a 1000 people at a developer conference 😅

As well as being invited to give the lecture, I was also invited to see the students final presentations for the course. Split into groups and coming up with an idea for a new web application, work on the design, build and deploy it.

Seeing the ideas that the students came up with was an eye opener. All of them were about, in some way, making the world a better place. Either through services to pepole to allow them to communicate better or ways to reduce our impact on the plannet. I loved the sense of civic responsibility in all of the ideas.

Looking at the quaity of the presentations I was overawed at the presentation skills of the teams, and the solutions that they came up with. Kudos to everyone! Far better than I remember either giving when I was a student, or seeing from others.

And then just to make the day perfect, when I was leaving to go home I ran into one of the teams in the car park and had a great conversation about the work they had done.

It's a long time since I was one of those students, but being involved again was such a refreshing experience!