Opera Software University Tours

(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

Мы начали университетский тур в Украине!
We've started our university tour in Ukraine!

Украина встретила нас снегом и ветром, что очень удивило нас. Однако несмотря на зимную погоду, мы нашли Киев очень красивым и интересном городом.
We were met with the snow and wind in Kiev and it surprised us a lot. Despite the winter weather the city looked very beautiful and interesting.

24 ноября Opera посетила Национальный Авиационный Университет, первый университет в нашем туре. Мы были встречены одним из активных членов Opera Campus Crew Андреем Малюкиным, который провел большую организационную работу для того, чтобы наш семинар прошел хорошо. И семинар оправдал наши ожидания.
Opera visited National Aviation University on the 24th of November, the first university in our tour. We were met by one of the most active Opera Campus Crew members Andrey Malyukin, who did very good job with organizing the seminar, which worked out very well. The seminar completely met our expectations!

Мы также пообщались с деканом Института Информационных Техноголий про этом университете и обсудили возможности сотрудничества в будущем.
We also had a talk with the Dean of Information Technologies Institute in this university and discussed future partnership opportunities.

Второй в нашем туре университет - Киево-Могилянская академия. Очень старый и красивый университет. Этот семинар прошел очень активно с большим количеством вопросов и обсуждений. Некоторые из студентов присоедились к нам вечером в пабе "Сундук", где мы продолжили общаться, знакомиться и спорить о браузерах за кружкой пива
The second university in out tour was Kiev-Mohyla Academy. It's a very old and beautiful university. The seminar was very active with a lot of questions and discussions. Some of the students from this university joined us later for community meeting we had in pub "Sunduk", where we continued our discussions about browsers with beer.

Фотографии с семинаров и встреч можно будет наблюдать здесь:
The pictures of the seminars and meetups will be available here soon:
http://my.opera.com/kumenova/albums/

ITT is a university which is focusing to support the development of technology dan telecommunication industry. I'm glad that Opera team can visit this uni. Almost 250 students were there to join and follow the seminar.

Afterwards, we went to a nice place in Dago for the meet up (picture will be upload soon). It was very nice to meet the fans of Opera. We were sharing experiences while enjoying the very nice view with a nice weather.

Photo Update :

Lovely!

Does that even sound like dandy? Am I stretching too far to come up with a clever title?

Anyways, on Tuesday morning we took a couple of hours to explore the heart of Glasgow. It really is an interesting place with some very cool architecture. The only downside – I had to keep running back to the rental car to renew the parking permit, as we could only find metered parking! Still, I had a great time exploring the city.

At around noon we started driving back to Dundee. Again, the Scottish countryside was stunning. It’s really neat driving through old towns with a lot of history and heritage buildings. In Canada, things tend to look fairly modern because we’re such a young country.

We arrived at Dundee University at around 2PM, starting at 3PM. There were signs for the seminar all over the campus, which was very cool. Around 100 students showed up and there was a great discussion of Standards that lasted for around 90 minutes. Particularly interesting, was Chris’ demonstration of the new video properties in HTML 5. He displays them using a neat video of some Lego people.
Apparently, it’s him as a child walking his dog…

There was a really nice reception afterwards; we ended up chatting for almost an hour with students and professors. Then, we drove down to Edinburgh for the night. It’s a very very unique city, and also a particularly windy city! The three of us attempted to walk into Old Town, but Roberto and I could not take the cold at 11PM so we retreated back to the hotel. We would get to see more of the city the next day…

Well, it’s taken a while to post reports from the Scottish leg of our tour, but I think it’s important to hear how they went!

Roberto and I made our way to the lovely town of Dundee on Sunday night, travelling by both plane and train for almost 8 hours! After a brief snooze, we woke up to meet Mr. Bruce ‘Awesome’ Lawson’s replacement, Chris Mills. Mills is a really cool guy and incredibly knowledgeable about Web Standards; he’s well known for writing Opera’s Web Standards Curriculum. He’s also really into Metal, hence the nickname, ‘Millsman’.

The three of us picked up our new rental car (sadly I did not get a photo of it), and began the quick journey to St. Andrews. Our GPS decided that it didn’t want to work as soon as we reached the campus. Fortunately, we didn’t need it for three hours when we were scheduled to leave for Glasgow…

We met up with our friends at St. Andrews and set up for the seminar. Still having alot of time before we were to start, we took a walk around the campus and had a quick bite. It’s beautiful there; it really reminds you of the Harry Potter castle .

The seminar went very well. There were a good number of students who seemed quite interested in the topics. We met with many really cool students afterwards, sharing some tea and biscuits. It’s been such a great experience getting to hear students’ perspectives on standards and the browser industry on this tour. St. Andrews was certainly interesting in this regard.

And then, we made our way to Glasgow…