Yes, learned. There was a whole lot of learning going on this past weekend at the CodeDay San Diego event held at the Ansir Innovation Center. In the words of Tom Paulus, Regional Manager and Lead Evangelist for CodeDay San Diego, "CodeDay is an inspiring event for students, many build skills and all leave with higher confidence." I was invited to serve as a judge for this event and arrived with the confidence of age and experience, "I'm the adult, not only will this be fun, it should be easy." Fun? Yes. Easy? Not even close. I arrived to a scene I imagined opening a can of worms might look like. The student participants ranged from 7th graders to college age. They were everywhere, talking about everything to everyone. There were all-male, all-female and co-ed teams each assembled randomly. The focus was on skills and trust, not gender. "I'm here with my sister" said one. When asked, "Where is your sister?" she pointed to a lumpy sleeping bag under a worktable. They had been working on projects all night and had achieved great things. Games were imagined, designed, built and successfully launched. By 7th graders. The same effort and result was true for the App developers, cloud-based start ups and all the other projects. A cloud-based SaaS start up to foster idea collaboration was inspired by a team of dreamers and developers because "We really didn't have an idea of what to work on." They successfully launched their app that connects dreamers and developers to move projects forward. They won the Best Overall award.

Technology Throwback

It was quarter century throwback for me. Ric French, Jeff McBride, Judy Shulman and I attended Windows 1st birthday in Atlanta with Bill Gates. All of us and all of the students had experienced the same wonder, curiosity, problem solving, sleep deprivation, exhilaration and most importantly, courage. To suspend disbelief, to leap into the unknown is the privilege of the young. What I learned this weekend is that it is alive and well here in San Diego.

Are You Ready to Learn?

I find that whenever I serve in the role of teacher, mentor, coach or judge, I'm often the one who learns the most. As a seasoned professional, no matter what your field of endeavor, I encourage you to seek out opportunities in your community like CodeDay. Yes it was fun and it wasn't easy to pick winners from the entries. That's because those who have the courage to leap are all winners. Thanks for the lesson Tom.