Talk at Technology Institute of Celaya
Last 9th of December I gave a talk at the Technology Institute of Celaya (Instituto Tecnológico de Celaya).
It was very important for me because this was the university where I graduated in 2005 as an engineer in electronics.
My talk was part of a series of presentations related to research topics. In my case, even though I have done a lot of research, I choose not to focus on that. Instead, what I prepared was a smörgåsbord (to use a Swedish word) of cool stuff where I tried to catch the attention of the students.
The first suggestion I received was to change the name of the presentation; I decided to keep the original title: “A life voiding warranties” or in Spanish “Una vida invalidando garantías”. This was funny for me because the name does describe my life: for every electronic product I got I felt the need to open it to see what’s inside.
In the first part of my presentation I focused on my professional life: the project that I have developed over the years and my current tasks. In the second part I presented my free-time projects and my experiences from working in hacker-spaces, mainly in Hackafe Plovdiv.
I finished my presentation with a few tips that I think, personally, that have helped me during my life. Let me share some of the tips with you:
- Be naive : when solving a problem, before thinking too much about it, try to come up with a naive solution. Thinking too much about the purpose of what I develop, stops me from doing new things… because I start finding reasons not to do it. One of the biggest examples were my beginnings with Functional Programming. Out of curiosity I started to learn it, and it’s what have had the strongest impact in my professional life.
- Keep yourself up-to-date : this is one of the most difficult things to do because nowadays there are tons of information on the web. I try to dig into many topics: different technologies, science, arts, design and psychology. Extrapolating ideas is easier when you get to know various ways of thinking.
- Share : During my student life I have met many people who think that keeping their knowledge in a sealed box will make them better than the other. On the contrary, for me, sharing my knowledge has always been a way to learn things better. That’s why I helped my classmates when studying for exams; teaching is the best way of learning.