Last December I was fortunate enough to attend the ‘Annual Centre of Excellence Distinguished Lecture’ from Dick Wall (of The Java Posse fame). At the time I was intending on writing a short post about it but it never quite materialised, however the other day while rummaging around the departments open-lecture series announcements I came across the recording from this lecture and I thought I would share it with you all. It is publicly available from the Kent Computer Science department here. Dick covered a range of very interesting topics including the progress of Computer Science in the last 20 years, the abundance of frameworks, open source, stateless computing and the Furby grid.

One of the points Dick mentioned that really grabbed my attention was the habit of graduates to build everything from the ground up dispite the wide availablity of open source solutions. Instead he emphasizes how much more important it is to work on the problems no one has tackled yet, it is this ambition to push development that really drives me to continue expanding my knowledge. It was truely fasinating to attend and having spent the last hour enjoying it again I highly recommend you take the time to download it and give it a listen.