Opera Software University Tours

If you want to know about first two cities visited on Spring Uni Tour Russia 2009, please, read the part one before.

Rostov on Don, May 14

Well, midnight train had moved us to Rostov on Don - one of the biggest city at the South Russia. Our seminar was scheduled at the Don State Technical University, and we was glad to see a very big interest to Opera from DSTU students and officials.

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Well, it's finished. Just two words can describe this tour: fast and effective. For four days we (Ilya Shpan'kov and Alexei Khlebnikov) lived in trains and tried to use the internet by laptop+mobile - but more importantly, we had a lot of interesting meetings with university officials, students, web-designers and more. Well, it was four fantastic days - from sea (Caspian Sea) to sea (Black Sea), across the two biggest and most well-known Russian Rivers - Volga and Don. All the cities we visited - Astrakhan, Volgograd, Rostov on Don and Krasnodar - are located in the south of Russia, and it's the first time Opera was there.

Below - more detailed about every city.

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Seriously. This week we are driving around the State of São Paulo for the second half of the Tour, after spending last week in Rio, and the weekend in São Paulo city. And being in Brazil, the car runs on alcohol, made from the sugar cane we see growing all around as we travel.

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Al final, no acabo o giro español con la ponencia de León. Voy a hacer una más en Zaragoza al 21 de Mayo, a las 12. Mas detalles más tarde - son ya las 22 del viernes en Brasil, y no quiero pasar toda la noche trabajando... (porque tengo planes de cenar con la familia de Patrick...)

(РУССКАЯ ВЕРСИЯ)

Our team (myself, Chris Mills and Alexey Feldgendler)is back from a short, but a very successful university tour we had in Ukraine. Within three days we visited three cities, talked in three universities and slept three nights in the trains.

We had the seminars, the community meetup, the round table with journalists and the Campus Crew meetup.

MONDAY. KIEV

Our tour started with meeting the journalists from the Ukrainian developers community (http://www.developers.org.ua/). After a very nice talk with those guys we ran straight to the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, where we were supposed to have a seminar with Kiev students.

When we arrived, we had the room, equipment and Wifi all prepared. That was perfect! By the time we started our presentation we had over 200 students in the room. It was amazing to see them all interested in Opera and Web Standards.

Taking about the standards, Chris gave many examples illustrating the usage of web standards in real life. Alexey provided the full and professional translation of Chris speech and answered all technical questions.

After the seminar we had a round table with the journalist, which also went well.

More fun to go - Community meet-up. A chance for anyone to have some beer with us and talk in unofficial atmosphere. We had about a dozen of Opera fans who joined us for beer and sushi . A couple of hours later we jumped into the train, which took us straight to Kharkov.

TUESDAY. KHARKOV

This was the city with the biggest Campus Crew team and audience we got. Over 300 students attended the seminar. I'm was very happy we got a big room This
was also the place where we got the longest queue for our "browse me" t-shirts after the seminar!

After the seminar we went for a walk and a quick dinner with our Kharkov Campus Crew. They guys were so nice and showed us the city, which in fact is very interesting to see.

We had to leave Kharkov the same day in the evening, and the next rain took us to Donetsk.

WEDNESDAY. DONETSK

We had a wonderful weather in all cities we went and Donetsk wasn't an exception. The city was welcoming us and so did the university. Again, the room was full with over 200 students itnerested in Opera seminar. This time it looked more like a rock concert where each of us was greeted with the storm of applause.

The seminar was a complete success with Chris speaking about Web Standards and Alexey showing our new Turbo feature. We stayed for about an hour after the seminar answering students' questions in the hall and taking pictures with them.


We came back to Kiev next day and had some time to discuss the tour results before we left home. All of us came up with the same conclusion: Ukrainian students are fun to work with and we are very happy with this tour.

The report in Russian is now available here: http://my.opera.com/russian/blog/show.dml/3242195
The pictures of the tour are available at: http://my.opera.com/kumenova/albums/
You can also find Chris's report here: http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2009/05/06/ukraine-university-tour-april-2009