My first lecture 👨‍🏫

A completely new experience for me. Around 3 weeks ago, a colleague asked me if I had the opportunity to hold a course for some students, and have a lecture in something cool. I said yes before I got the time to really think about it. I’ve wanted to something like this for a while, but I feel like it’s not that sort of opportunity that comes around too often. The lecture were scheduled for 14th of October 🙈

I knew right away what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to show the students that not everything don’t have to be perfect. That if they have an idea, they should try to run with it. I think it’s important to show this to the students. It’s pretty common for developers (and desigers) to struggle with impostor syndrome, and you go around with a feeling that whatever you do, you don’t have the skills to follow trough.

I wanted to show the students (All from Online at NTNU) the first iteration of MTBMap Norge. This is a very small app I created in 2020, and the first iteration was around 5 hours of work. I had 2.5hours with the students, so I needed to cut back a little bit on state-handling for errors and such, but I wanted to get them at least 80% there.

In short; It went surprisingly well. I had created a Github repo with all the code, with 5 checkpoints. This allowed the participants to jump in whenever they wanted. And if they got lost, they could check out a a branch, and be on track again. This worked very well, and some of the students told me they appreciated the effort in the repo, and when they got into some simulator/emulator issue or bad network or some kind of unrelated issue. They could deal with that and jump back into the code when they were ready.

This my first experience with holding a lecture. I done shorter stuff, but not something that lasts up towards 3 hours (Lecture + food + small talk). My previous experiences comes down to 10-20minute talks and having basic lectures for a squad in the nation guard (formally I have taken a 4 week squad leader course). These previous experiences came in handy, but I became kind of startled when the room filled up with over 25 students, mostly in their 3-5 year.

All in all, it went very well. And the little feedback I’ve gotten at this point is very positive 😊 I’m very glad I said yes, and it was fun to do. I hope the attendees found it useful, and I really hope I get to do this again 🤟