and welcome to day two of our British science week live Q&A
webinars today we're all about
software and programming hopefully you've had a chance to
watch some of the videos maybe
have a go at some of the activities in the activity pack
and if you haven't hopefully
you'll be able to do that after this call and so if you'd
like to ask a question of
any of our panelists and we're going to introduce them to
you in a moment you click on the Q&A
button at the bottom of the screen and you can type your
question into there so just
to give you all a chance to think of your questions I'm
going to ask each of the panelists
to introduce themselves so Michael would you like to go
first? Good afternoon my name is
Michael Bocas I'm from the European University in the
School of Computer Communications I started
off as a computer scientist and I suppose I still am
although I've worked in industry
for ever so many years and recently back in academia.
Lovely thank you Michael and
Nikki would you like to go next?
Yeah first of all my name is Nikki Hughes I got involved
like Mike many many years ago I was
worked at a PhD using software data I worked in industry I've
worked for a workforce
I'm a associate lecturer with the European University and I
also work with groups all
around the world putting together robotic competitions. I've
also been head of department
to school so I've been taught at GCSE A level and Tech
level students. Brilliant thank you
Nikki. Jo would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah hi
everyone I'm Jo Hodgson I lead the UK
team here at Red Hat. Red Hat is a software company based
on open source software and open
source practice and principles and I started I did a
computing science degree and have been
in industry all of that time in various roles. Lovely thank
you Caitlin would you like to go next?
Yeah hi so I am a BC apprentice I am three years into a
four-year course doing a degree
in software engineering and yeah that's sort of really nice.
Lovely thank you Caitlin and last but not least Joost.
Thanks Carol yeah I'm Joost and I work at
BT Applied Research where I am called a chief researcher
software practically that means I
lead the BT's software engineering research program. I
studied computing science specialized
in software engineering and after a career being a
university lecturer where I taught software
engineering I now do it in practice and try to make sure
everything that I ever told students
gets done in practice. Brilliant thank you very much
everyone so just to remind you if you've
got any questions if you click on the Q&A button at the
bottom of the screen and then you can type
your question in and we'll try to answer as many of those
over the call as we can. I'm going to
start with a question I'm going to ask all of you and that
is what's the best thing about your job?
Caitlin I'm going to come to you first. So at the moment my
job is a little bit different I guess to
the average as being an apprentice I have rotated every
nine months or so over the last three years
and I will do the last year as well. I've done Scrum Master
which is basically like a delivery
manager role in software I'm also at the moment I'm doing
automation so working with robots which
is really quite cool and then I've done testing and I've
done programming with web applications so
for me at the moment as an apprentice I've done so many
different things so that's probably the
best bit about my job at the moment is that I'm doing so
many different things and figuring out
what I want to do when I finish in a year or so. That
sounds fantastic thanks Caitlin variety is
the spice of life and software and programming. Okay I'm
going to come to you next Nicky what's
the best thing about your job? Well over the years the best
thing
it's been a whole range of different people that I've met
and the opportunities to go places and
to work with different bits of hardware and different bits
of software it's just a whole
range of different opportunities that I've had over the
years has been and I'm very old but
it's been an amazing opportunity to be there and work with
such a multitude of different kinds of
people. Fantastic so another one around the variety Jo what's
the best thing about your job?
I have to say it's the people I work with passionate
brilliant people every day and
and it brings a level of energy and an enthusiasm and yeah
I can't speak
highly enough of the people I work with that really makes
my day every day.
Brilliant thank you and Michael. Gosh I think well very
much like Joanna the people that I work with
just so fabulous so I get this a superb opportunity to
cross barriers so I work within industry
and I work within academia but one of the most important
things for me is that I give people
a chance by helping to design courses at the university so
giving young people a real chance to
make a difference for their lives. Brilliant thank you
Michael and finally Joost what's the
best thing about your job? Well I can echo the people bit
but given that that's covered I think
the best part of my job is I work in research which means
that I get to play around with what
is the future of software engineering what's the next big
thing on the horizon I get the experiments
I try to I could try this out with my team and find out new
stuff and really look at it and say
oh this is cool I just want to play around with this for a
bit and see what it can do for others
that for me there's nothing better than that. Brilliant
thank you Joost and so we've got some
some great questions coming in from the audience already
and this first one is from Jack so Jack
thank you for your question and I'm going to ask you this
question Nicky. Jack says I'm going to
my new school in September and I've just got my first
computer at my primary school we don't do
much computer programming and I really want to get ahead
before I move schools what do you recommend
that I do? Well if you haven't done any programming at all
or very little I would I would suggest you
get into Scratch because that's a brilliant opportunity and
Scratch it's free it's it's available
there there is a ton of resources to help you get into
programming and understand it people think it
might look really simple because you're dragging blocks
around but it is not but a lot of the
concepts in there that you'll come across at a much much
much higher level so you can get really good
at Scratch you can then transfer all those skills to other
ones so I would certainly look at Scratch
I would also look at Python and just find yourself there's
quite a few if you do a little bit of
searching you'll find some some introductory to Python
courses start with Scratch and then start
having a little look at Python doesn't matter what too much
what the language is it's the concepts
that matter. That's brilliant thank you Nicky and this one
I think I'm going to ask Michael this
question Michael this is what is your favorite programming
language and I think I should add to
that why? I think that's a pretty difficult one I tend to
work a lot with hardware and real-time
systems I have done in the past and so working close to the
silicon is really really important
and working with you know a language that that really optimizes
that so I spend a lot of time
looking at C I can't say that it's how do I put this I can't
say that it's it's the easiest
language to to pick up and to get right because it can
create lots of problems but I think more
recently when working on machines where I can distribute
code across you know very many cores
then having a mechanism to do that really easily Python has
given us research is a great opportunity
to do that and to wrap up code in a very nice and neat way
so you know it's flexibility I guess is
the key for me and bringing together those key parts to
help solve a given problem so it's not
just one language I guess and it's never one language for
the bigger systems in fact.
Brilliant thank you Michael and Joost I'm going to come to
you next this question's coming from
Emily so Emily thank you for your question can you explain
what it low code and no code mean?
Yes absolutely so I think what you're most familiar with is
the kind of thing that Michael
was referring to as well is traditional general purpose
programming right you have a language
you can you can solve almost any problem but you have to
build a lot of stuff from scratch
low code and no code is much more looking at it from the
point of view of there are specialists
in the world who work in a certain problem domain as we
normally refer to it so you might have a
data scientist for example who doesn't think in terms of if
then else and things like that but
more in terms of I have a data set and I want to perform
some cleaning of that data or something
like that and a lot of that still goes back to a computer
has to do it so low code and no code is
really a movement that tries to offer up programming
languages or more specific languages that really
support that a lot more closely so that sounds a bit vague
but think in terms of if I'm doing
statistical analysis I want to have a language that allows
me to say I want to use that analysis
as opposed to programming everything from scratch that low
code brings it closer to the area that
you're working and a lot of that really goes in the
direction of making sure people can do their
job can unlock the power of computing but they don't have
to do a full degree in software
developments and lower level languages just to get stuff
done and the low code is finds a middle
ground whereas no code gets the point of it's it's almost
completely possible to write a program
without having to write a single line of code and finding
that balance is where a company has to
decide. Lovely thank you Joost and my next question is
coming from Sarah and I'm going to ask Jo this
question so Jo Sarah asks what would you say are common
misconceptions about programming?
Well I'm sure there are quite a lot one is that it's a very
lonely activity sole activity so
we do a lot of pair programming and and team programming
and many programming projects require
a team different disciplines you know server side
developers front-end developers designers and so
it can often be a much more team environment than perhaps
one of the misconceptions.
I think the the other is that it's not a creative topic and
I I think programming is absolutely
unlocks your creativity you are this developing something
from scratch something that doesn't exist
or hasn't existed in this way or needs a problem solving
and it requires a level of creativity and
sometimes the perception is that this is a very a very uncreative
discipline and and I the best
programmers I know are highly creative people there's a
couple. That's brilliant thank you
very much Jo and my next question is for Caitlin. Caitlin
are there any subjects that you'd suggest
that people should study at school if they want to work in
an apprenticeship like yours?
So I know from my experience I did actually Dr Hughes as I
know Nikki was my school teacher
so from GCSE to A levels so I did computer science GCSE and
then I did a level three
DTech IT course for my sixth form and it was it was really
helpful to have that sort of behind me
I did Python, Scratch, I did something called App Inventor
as well which is very similar to Scratch
and I did come into to Adastral which is where I work now
and did stalls for British Science Week
so I had I had programming background I did you have
computer science but I know people
who are apprentices who haven't done computer science
before it's sort of just about having
the passion when it comes to having the role that I'm in to
be able to want to be an apprentice
if you have the passion to learn then you're more than
likely to get a place.
Brilliant thank you Caitlin and the next question is coming
from Tom and I think this is probably
one for you Nikki and Tom is asking we have some raspberry
pies in my school and we have a microbit
emulator what projects could we try? Yeah hi Tom if you go
to the Raspberry Pi website you will find
there are a wealth of lovely kind of projects whole range
of them and they're all graded as well
so you can do projects in a whole range of different things
from things like games to music
to robots digital art so don't have a look at Raspberry Pi
projects you'll find them those
as there as well and it's the same the other the other
website you can have a look at is the
for the microbit emulator again that's the arm have got arm
who people that produce the processes
that are used they have also have a whole lot of teaching
materials and projects that you can try
out there so go and look at the microbit foundation and
they've got some really nice
projects that you can do there as well and kind of got
communities that you can join in as well.
Brilliant thank you Nikki and the next question that's come
in here is coming from Luke and I'm
going to ask this one to Michael. Michael what would be the
best programming language to learn
to get into software is there a certain programming
language I need to learn first?
Oh that's a that's a pretty difficult one you know as
people have been saying there are so many
programming languages and I guess it's getting on that
ladder and it depends on really if you've had
some experience I guess it's something that you need to
build upon from looking at something like
Scratch as Nikki said and looking at Python and I think
that you know if you're at school or college
then really concentrating on Python and understanding the
fundamentals of programming
it's not so much about the programming vehicle itself it's
not so much about the language
it's more about being able to understand those fundamental
things that we use to compose
problems that run on machines and you'll get that from ever
so many programming languages
and of course you know you can get fixated on a certain
thing I want to develop an app and I
wanted to run on iOS I wanted to run an Apple machine I
need to write in Swift and so forth
but really I think you need to take a step back and really
think about well how do I develop my
digital skills how do I develop my thinking how do I
develop my design of algorithms and you know
whatever language that you pick is going to be suitable but
certainly I'd start with Python
you know if you've had some background that's for sure.
That's brilliant thank you Michael and Joe I've got a
couple of questions I'm going to sort of
tie together now for you if I may and I apologize in
advance if I say this wrong and the first one
is is Linux or Linux I think it's Linux a programming
language and the second one is
what's the difference between Linux or Linux and Unix? Okay
so Linux is an operating system
rather than a programming language per se but obviously it's
software that is developed and
and you can run software on top of it and and if you're
curious about exploring more about Linux
there's a brilliant website called whatcanidoforfidora.org
and Fedora is an open source
Linux project and it allows people who want to to
experiment and explore but are a bit uncertain
about how they could get involved in open source projects
and Linux in particular
it's a it's a great place to start and the main difference
and and maybe somebody else on the
panel might might correct me if I'm wrong the main
difference between Linux and Unix is Linux is is
open source as I mentioned before so anybody can contribute
to it most flavors of Unix are
propriety proprietary and closed source so if you work in
the organization you can you can
contribute to them but if you're outside you can't whereas
Linux and there are many many flavors of
of Linux available but they're they're typically they're
they're all open source and you can and
anybody can can contribute to improving Linux. That's
brilliant thank you Josh I should have
had confidence with my first pronunciation of Linux not
Linux so thank you. Next question that
we've got as has come in from again from Jack I think this
is possibly Jack's second question
and I'm going to ask it to you Joost and that is what does
it mean when people say the cloud?
Oh that's an excellent question I think when you look
online you will see the slide that says the
cloud is just someone else's computer right and it always
seems a bit odd but fundamentally it's true
right when you think of what the cloud is when when you
talk of the Google cloud is Google has
a whole bunch of servers somewhere that can do stuff for
you and you can write software that
runs in the cloud that runs on on Google's machines and you
just follow a certain set of
patterns of how these machines talk to each other right it's
it's on the internet so you use
internet-based communication and and that fundamentally is
the best way to look at the cloud
it's not a magical solution that that'll make all your
problems go away it is a way of getting
access to as we call it compute that is owned by someone
else and they charge you for the privilege
of using it and you can have that in for ions off and it
gets quite odd when you start looking
at the boundaries you can have on-premises cloud so BT for
example has their own dedicated server
park on site where you can do the same thing as with Google
and it's still someone else's
computer it is not my team's computer or my computer but it
is BT's computer and that's
that's a good way to look at the cloud it's it's just
someone else's computer
that's brilliant I've never heard it described in that way
but that makes a lot of sense now
so thank you for that one and the next question is coming
from the year five Helicon class who I
think were on the call yesterday so hello again guys and
Michael I'm going to ask you this question
and that is what is the best website for programming wow
that's a fantastic question
uh almost stumped me there um I think this if you take one
step back this comes down to trying to
understand what you're you know what you're trying to get
out of it um one of the easiest ways to get
into programming I think when you first come about um you
come to look at uh programming is to look
at examples and so forth um there are ever so many examples
around the Scratch websites um and so many
of them in point of fact where there are simple little
ideas to help you build upon so I think
if you kind of dig around in that area you'll find um you
know something that really is
suitable for you but Nikki I think you probably had more
experience with some of those early websites
have you got a comment there Nikki yes I'm trying to think
about something that would would point
you I think it depends on what you're after here um is
whether you're having one that's got you've
got your kind of choices you've got ones that will teach
you how to program in a programming language
um and there's quite a lot of those can code academy type
things go and look at eyes at
computer science because that's again what year are you
year five did you say yes they year five
yes um but it is actually for conducive to the air level
but if you're if you're doing some good
stuff that you might find it's got some useful information
useful links here that's the eyes
at computer science um website um so there's those that
will teach you how to program in the language
the other ones are ones that come with lots of little
questions for you to solve and so what
it's doing you're improving your skills by um um completing
a whole lot of little little small
little mini challenges and then the third ones are ones
that are projects so you know you want
to solve this problem and will kind of lead you along a
path to how to do it so I think you need
to decide what it is you're wanting to do whether you're
wanting to learn that language do lots of
little little short exercises or do a big project um and
then decide what programming language you
want so whether it's scratch or whatever and then you will
find there's some really good resources
out there fantastic thank you both um and I've got another
question that's coming here from Luke and
I'm going to direct this one to you Jo um it says I've
heard about smart cities how do you program
something as large as a city yeah um in little chunks um so
yes you can imagine the sheer scale
of uh of designing a smart city and of course most cities
that exist in the world um were built years
ago before there was the technology so typically and many
of this stuff has to work together but
typically you're um you're creating a capability a smart
capability or or using technology around
a particular function within a city so you might uh be
measuring the the traffic flow on roads in
order to help manage um your traffic jams or you might be
um monitoring the the water quality of
the river that runs through the city or or you might any
number of things you might be uh you
might create a smart parking capability where people can
always take me to the closest parking
space available so most cities because you're retrofitting
technology into most uh into cities
and you're actually developing um technology for a
particular purpose or applying technology to a
particular purpose needed in the city there is also a need
you won't program it at this level
necessarily but it does there is a need to design how those
things interoperate and how you monitor
those because those might have a knock-on effect if you
have a if the if the river bus it's banks
it's likely to have a knock-on effect to traffic that's
likely to have a knock-on effect to the
emergency services and so there is a need to to integrate
these things and have a view across
all of those elements um if you're building a city from
scratch which in some parts of the world they
are building smart cities from the ground up then you can
really design all that that stuff in from
this from the start but i guess the last thing i'd say is
also that smart cities aren't all about
the technology smart cities are also about how humans live
and work and socialize in the city
um and sometimes that's that's hard with cities that were
built for industrial um
high concentration of of people uh and so we're having to
think about those problems quite
differently than for some of our existing cities so it's a
it's a great area to to work in uh
and it's got a lot of problems that need to to be solved in
there does that help hopefully that's
fantastic thank you now i've got two very similar questions
which i'm going to ask to all of you
because they're a fantastic question um and it's it's a
mixture it's coming from luke and also
again from the year five helicon class and that is what's
the best or the coolest program you've
ever coded so um caitlin i'm going to start with you well i
think it's what i'm doing right now
actually um i am automating a robot um to do a task that
someone like a bt employee would do
that was maybe like a very long take a lot of time to do
and i'm programming to do it maybe once i
think it's going to be about once a month um to go through
it um and do it for them and then we'll
just see the results um afterwards which is a great benefit
to the business and it's so
it's very interesting um seeing how it all works out and
all that sort of side of things so yeah
automating that processes is quite cool brilliant thank you
caitlin um nikki the same question to
you and i think the thing for me it was i was processing
data from publishing satellites
i had data that was ever taken every three hours a day 24
now 24 nautical mile resolution for the
whole globe and i was processing this data for input into
climate models to look at climate
change because when the big uncertainties in our climate
models is what happens in the cloud we
didn't know where the clouds were so i was analyzing that
to summarize where the clouds were
to input into current models and that involved some of the
music some of the biggest computers
then at the time in the uk at in the time it was going back
a long time that sounds very cool uh
michael how about you yeah i've done a load of cool things
um like nikki i've worked on satellite
communications down in goon hilly in cornwall uh solving
problems for inmarsat on low earth orbit
satellites and um i have to say that you know that was a
huge challenge and fundamentally
really exciting um and the other thing well another thing
that i've done uh i can't say too
much about it but i've worked on eurofighter uh which is
the typhoon aircraft that's up in the
skies at the moment patrolling um the borders of ukraine
and looking at um i don't have identification
friend or foe so being able to detect whether or not um it's
a friendly or unfriendly aircraft
and having the opportunity to do something as cool as that
um was something that i just found was a
wow a real wow factor um just fantastic and having that
opportunity or being given those opportunities
and seizing them um is something that i would recommend
never turn away from an opportunity
fantastic thank you michael um and same question to you joe
what's the coolest thing you've ever
programmed or coded i feel like nothing i say now will be
cool it's been a long time since i've done
um much coding but uh and i guess it was always the ones i
really enjoyed was where i spent my
life in customer roles in roles working with customers
helping customers solve problems and so
um it was where i i was really tackling a like a gnarly
problem they were struggling with and
i was able to solve it so it was those aha moments when i i
fixed something sense of satisfaction from
finally getting to the bottom of the problem yeah i can
imagine that yeah thank you and finally
yost what's the coolest thing that you've ever programmed
so i think i'm going to almost land
on the same initial answer as katelyn is the thing i'm
currently working on so one of the big problems
we have in bt is we have a lot of old software lying around
that people don't really understand
because the original people who wrote it are no longer
around um so for the last few years we've
been working on a system uh a software system that can look
at that code and understand what
it's looking at identify the important parts so we're using
effectively we're teaching a computer
to understand itself to work out these are the important
parts of a software system that i would
like to pick up and put in the cloud and make everything
ready for the for the next decade
and it's it's working on how does a computer understand its
own coding
and leveraging all the cloud compute you can get because it
takes a lot of compute power to do this
uh building all that up and then finally seeing it give an
answer that makes sense and then it being
able to explain itself as well that's uh that's a very uh
very interesting thing to do so that's
likely the best thing i've done fantastic some great
answers there that just showed the real
variety of things that software and programming are used
for i think um katelyn i'm going to come
to you with this next question and it's from sarah and it
says how would you describe programming to
a non-technical person um i think it's always whenever i
speak to someone that like any of my
friends or whatever they think that i have like the most
insane job and they could never do it
um but i think that's a load of like malarkey i think you
can definitely do it from
just starting with scratch it's so it's building blocks if
i think if you
when you come down to a program every you have to break it
down and it's simple steps it's like
a flow chart but just made a little bit more complex and
that's the best way to describe
programming it's a flow chart brought to life um so if you
can sort of understand the basics of any
problem you can probably start programming it fantastic
that's a brilliant way to understand
it thank you um now our next question that's coming from kate
and i'm going to ask this one
to you nikki and that is how do programming languages like
python actually tell a computer
how to work well i think you've got to understand is we
have a processor in a computer and that
processor has an instruction set katelyn knows this because
i told her and you know a lot more
now katelyn but you'll remember me talking to you about it
um so it's this instruction set and that
is put there by whoever a group of people who designed that
processor and they decide what
those basic instructions are and they are then hard coded
into the logic that makes up that
process so when we write in python that's python has been
written to be nice to us
to people but it looks like something that we understand
but all the computer can do is execute
the constructions in the instructor in the instruction set
and so i'll whether it's python
whether it's seen this is what doesn't matter what the
programming language is it has to get
translated into the machine code with that processor and
then it's that that there are the instructions
that will then be executed using a fetch decode execute
cycle one instruction at a time or multiple
ones if you've got multiple cores by that processor and it's
understanding that that is absolutely key
to to to programming and understanding that everything has
to get translated and it's this
instruction set of the processes that is the key to
understanding how they work
brilliant thank you nikki and the next question is from josh
and i'm going to ask this one to you
jost and that is is there such a thing as bad code or bad
programming oh definitely yes absolutely
um what i always uh tell and we used to tell students when
i was still teaching is that it's
really easy to write software it is really hard to do it
well uh when when it comes to code there's
any number of ways that code can be bad right i always was
very skeptical when students would
tell me but it works so it's fine right as simple as um is
it easy for someone else to read the code
is it um properly indented right do you have to a set
number of spaces so that the structurally is
easy uh what happens where um to the point of are you using
proper variable names so that you can
understand where something happens or how many lines of
code do you have in a in a method that
you execute is it 600 lines and it doesn't fit on the
screen then it's a lot harder to understand
than if it's 10 lines of code and it easily is readable on
your screen and you quite rapidly get
into away from programming into the engineering question of
is your code fast enough to do the
job that it needs to do functionally it might be fine but
if it takes years to get there it's not
fit for purpose either so that there's a whole more a whole
lot more to it than uh it works it
does the job uh and uh and there's there's a whole
discipline in this i mean if you want to look
online for example at some at the definition of code smells
as they call them which are
known things that you should avoid when you write code and
that includes things like give your
variables proper names give your methods proper names use
camel casing so use capitalization
to highlight where a certain word begins and ends those
kind of things make code easy to understand
and easier to work with and in particular if you're working
in a team that is really important
because if you make your life easy but someone else's life
hard the whole team still suffers
so yeah absolutely that is such a thing as bad code
fantastic thank you jost and now a question i'm going to
ask to all of you um and that is do any
of you have any famous computer or data scientists that
inspired you to go into a career in software
and programming and michael i'm going to ask that to you
first please well i wasn't going to say the
usual um alan turing but actually sitting behind me i've
got some books by richard feynman um who
was a cool physicist a great thinker um a man that inspired
so many generations in ever so many ways
and made such a difference to how certainly i thought about
computing um and i still find even
now going back and reading some of his papers absolutely
fascinating so a huge piece of
inspiration for me richard feynman fantastic thank you michael
caitlin
yeah um i've always heard about ada lovelace from like so
like from the beginning when i first
started programming and obviously she was the first
computer programmer and she's a woman so
it made a lot of um inspiration for myself and that is
possible to there's women that do what
i do and it like what i want to do and it was an
inspiration for our school and still
fantastic thank you caitlin nikki how about you yeah it's a
guy you'll have heard of he's called
john alti and he when i went to university um he had he was
a head of uh computer computer
laboratories and he decided anybody who had to do a science
degree in the whole of the university
i went to university had could not graduate unless they
could program and if it hadn't been for him i
would not be here now and so he turned out huge numbers and
no matter what you're doing any science
uh degree you had to better program we had faster numbers
of them they had the computers all sorted
out it was all done on uh we had uh punch cards every every
science student was doing it and
that's why i'm here now so really hats off to him because
he did a fantastic job fantastic he sounds
like he was ahead of his time brilliant thank you joe is
there anyone that inspired you a few have
been mentioned my daughter's middle name is ada and you can
imagine where that came from um and
and um touring has has quite was quite prominent but um the
other person it wasn't necessarily
computer scientists he's a mathematician mandelbrot um who
um designed created uh the use the maths to
to figure out fractals and uh it was the first time i
really saw beauty art almost in it from
from maths and of course they used computer programs in
order to generate those images and
i'm sure if you if you're not familiar with those images
take a look they are striking and and um
yeah mandelbrot probably in addition to some of those
others that we mentioned it's the other
person who really not not when i was at school but when i
was at university somebody whose words have
lasted my entire career it was she was my um lecturer at
the time um she was called muffy
thomas then she's now called um professor muffy caulder she's
the head of computing at garland
university um and her words were really uh really have have
left lasted with me and she encouraged
me to continue questioning and asking questions and and i
have used that throughout my career and
i had the opportunity to go back and tell her how
inspiration those words were many years later and
i i really appreciated that opportunity thank you joe that's
fantastic and finally jost is there
anyone that has inspired you yeah so the person that comes
to mind is donald knuth so knuth is
known as one of if not the best programmer that ever was at
least in my opinion he is absolutely
fantastic and and the best story about donald knuth that he
wrote this this seminal book the
seminal series of books called the art of computer
programming and and he set a challenge at that
point where he said if you can find a bug in my code i will
send you a check for e dollars which
is 2.7 something dollars um and he knew full well that that
he's not perfect right it's a perfect
example of you can be really good but this is still a
really hard discipline and people have
found so many bugs that they would get a check and people
would keep those as a badge of honor saying
i've got i found a bug in kluf's code so they have that on
their wall somewhere and at a certain
point his bank told him you can't issue these checks
anymore because there are so many open
checks that could be claimed at any point in time that you
will have no money right so it highlights
everything about software engineering and development it's
a really good developer he
really knows what he's doing still bugs are in the code and
you always have to be have to be a bit a
bit humble there and kluf captures that perfectly in that
story so that i find it really interesting
that's fantastic thank you all for sharing those and if any
of you are feeling inspired from what
you've just heard particularly we've got our maths day on
thursday and our robotics day is on friday
so do join us for those if you can um now coming towards
the end of our q a now and i just want to
ask all of the panelists one more question um is if you had
20 seconds with your younger self
what advice would you give yourself um i'm going to start
with you caitlin
yeah um it's really i i was um i'm really about starting
programming when i was
i did it in middle school when i did it in upper school i
sort of didn't know if i wanted to carry
it on and to be honest dr q's is probably the reason i
carried it on um so yeah she's been she
is an inspiration to me to be fair so you think about her
daily when it comes when i'm doing my
programming um but just advice my younger self is don't put
too much pressure on on yourself at the
time like to get something right there's people around you
that will be able to help if you're
doing it in in school if you're doing it in your job there's
people around you to help just don't
i've fell in the trap before i the pressure i used to put
on myself was immense and it would just it
wouldn't it wouldn't help in any way so my advice is just
don't put the pressure on just reach out
and someone will be helpful and hopefully help you solve a
problem brilliant thank you caitlin
joe what advice would you give your younger self i would
say to lean into imperfection and failures
that your biggest learning points are going to come from
the the the moments when you something
went wrong or didn't go the way you wanted and i was a real
perfectionist and um wanted to do
everything right and actually that's not where i'm going to
learn i'm learning when i'm when i'm i'm
yeah i make mistakes and and i reflect on them and i figure
out how i could do it better and so
lean into those um those imperfections those mistakes those
failures because that's where
you'll make the biggest strides fantastic thank you joe michael
what advice would you give your
younger self i would i would say to seize every single
opportunity that you are presented and to
never get to a situation where you believe in somebody that
says you cannot do this
um for me i think actually getting hold of that at a very
early stage in my life rather
than slightly later on um would have been a fantastic piece
of advice and it's something
that actually i use as a guiding principle for my life now
i take every opportunity and go for it
brilliant thank you michael nikki the same question for you
please
yeah similar i think i'll just say be brave and again it's
taking all every opportunity that comes
on and going for it even though you might feel exposed and
you might feel you know you can't do
this just be brave and go up there and do it yeah brilliant
thank you nikki and finally yost what
advice would you give your younger self uh i would say um
don't don't box yourself in to a particular
direction or a particular career path or something like
that so initially i put myself on on the
university career path and becoming an academic and i
switched to industry to bt a few years ago
and that's that's just so much fun stuff to do out there
everything has its benefits there's
a whole lot of whole world out there and you will find out
about new stuff only once you start
getting underway that the things change rapidly in this
world new positions will be available by
the time you get into into a career and always be and be on
the lookout as said for uh by michael for
for new opportunities and and jump on something if it seems
seems good because the opportunities
are endless in this space really brilliant thank you yost
so we've we've come to the end now of our
q a i'm sorry we didn't manage to get to all of the
questions um like yesterday we'll take all of the
questions we couldn't answer and we will put them on our
website with some answers so you'll be able
to catch up with those in the next week or so i just want
to say a huge thank you to all of our
panelists today who've answered your questions so well and
one of the things i've taken away from
today is how much fun they all seem to have doing their
jobs so a huge thank you to nikki to joe to
michael to katelyn and to yost for for giving up their time
and answering all of your questions
um tomorrow day three is the um it's digital manufacturing
day so we'll be back tomorrow at
two with another q a and there'll be some more great
content on the website friday we're looking
at robotics i'm doing that backwards now and thursday we're
looking at maths so um so do have
a look at those when they come live if you're taking part
in any of our q a's or you're doing
any of the activities from the activity packs and you have
any pictures please email them to us at
computerscience@bt.com or you can if you tweet them can you
um you could @adastralpark on that
and use the hashtag bsw22 because we would absolutely love
to see them and understand
all the fun you've been having and all the things you've
been doing so finally a big thank you to my
panelists and thank you to you the audience for your
fantastic questions today and we
hope that we will see you again tomorrow bye for now
you
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