Today was a rainy day and you cannot say it was not! As usual I didn’t have an umbrella with me, so I “accidentally” got very wet until I got to the Faculty of Informatics and Mathematics a.k.a FMI, where was about to be held the next seminar from the series of seminars, which are organized by the IT Leaders Academy. So, in this post, you will be reading about what we talked about and what was the whole seminar all about.

Our lecturers were Rob Miles(blog|twitter) and Damien Caro(blog|twitter) who are two of the key speakers in the tomorrow’s starting conference – Microsoft Days 2011. Of course, as usual, there was some serious organizational problem and to be more concrete – it was a technical one. The projector wasn’t working, but happily the problem was fixed!

Mr. Miles was first to step in and he said some really serious things concerning our future as IT experts. What he said was, that the days in which we start our careers as specialists in one technology and finish it working the same thing are GONE. There’s no more such thing! It just doesn’t exist! I can’t really agree more, while I really want to. If I must be honest, recently I read a post, which was stating the same thing, but kill me, I don’t know where I found it and I can’t give you the link right now.

The second topic on which he stressed on was our personal brand. He said that we need to create our personal brand by blogging, for example. He claims that it’s better to do blogging and that way develop our writing skills, because now and in the future the IT experts (or specialists, use whatever word you like) will need not only their IT-specific skills to succeed, but writing ones and even more important – presentational skills. He also mentioned that we should carefully use social media sites like Facebook, because it is getting more and more often when employers are, let’s say, checking it. Of course, they are not checking only Facebook, that’s why it’s good for us, when someone Google/Bing-s us(and believe me, employers do this), to have our personal brand “well developed”(i can’t think of other phrase). Finally, before he showed us his Robot – Oscar and how we can write C# code and control it easily, he recommended us to widen our skills and use SkyDrive! 😀

Before Damien Caro stepped in we talked about the future of the programming languages and both Ray and Damien said that HTML5 and JavaScript(especially) will be there in the future for a very long time! So, if you love JavaScript and you thought something will happen with it and it will go away – don’t be scared any more! 😉

Mr. Caro’s part of the seminar was all about the cloud! He talked about the SkyDrive and the Office Web Apps, made a demo on the PowerPoint web app and explained us about the data centers in which all the cloud magic happens. We saw a picture from, I think, Microsoft’s data center in Dublin and believe me, that thing is HUGE! We talked about how electricity is provided for all the machines there, how are they cooled and how is the replication going(did you know that all the information, which is saved in Dublin’s data center is replicated into Amsterdam’s data center in case of disaster?). Of course, when we talk about Microsoft and The Cloud(capital letters for respect) there’s no way we don’t talk about Windows Azure. By the way, I am amazed how can so few people have heard about Azure, SkyDrive, Office Web Apps and all of the Microsoft’s cloud services and offerings…

At the end of the seminar Rob Miles encouraged everyone interested in C# to find his book on this subject and we all gave them a huge applause, because it was a great one hour spent with them! Now I remember that he even made a photo of us, which will be posted in his blog! Hm, I am looking forward to seeing it… 🙂

Now if you excuse me, I need to take my 6-hour sleep, because I will attend my first Microsoft Days tomorrow!