My developerWorks, OpenNTF.org, IBM Lotus, college students and recent graduates!

11/20/2009 04:39 PM by Chris Toohey

Jim Shields, software developer and recent college graduate, talks about how he uses developerWorks and why it's a great resource for students in software engineering.

Jim Shields talks about how developerWorks, and in particular how My developerWorks can be an invaluable resource to recent college graduates.

Not just a resource for recent college graduates, developerWorks Podcaster Scott Laningham also interviews a current student:

Marcel Santilli, a student at the University of Texas, talks about using developerWorks for learning more about Rational software development tools and broaden his overall developer knowledge.

In addition, I've recently had several exchanges with both active college students and recent graduates (from Computer Science and like-principal fields) that -- and this was a surprise to me -- were not only familiar with IBM Lotus Notes Domino and the online Lotus Community, but were using Lotus Notes Domino as their platform for development assignments.

While I won't give away names (to protect the innocent!), the students were from France and Ireland. Apparently there's a professor in Ireland who's teaching their development-track students Lotus Notes Application Development.

What did I learn in college? I worked as a library security guard, making sure students didn't (how should I put this) act inappropriately on premises or rip pages out of the periodicals to use as rolling papers... I guess that's what I get for not going to college in Ireland (and taking Criminology to boot).

The French students who contacted me -- who I'll refer to here as I did in our email exchanges as the gang -- were putting together a paper on IT strategies. It's focus was on IBM Lotus and OpenNTF.org, and they contacted me as a project chef for several active projects there.

After an email-exchange interview with me (and apparently Niklas Heidloff), they had enough to put together what looked like an A+ overview of the strategy behind open source initiatives like OpenNTF.org and the benefits to the vendor, the participants, and ultimately the customer.

Gang, if you're reading this: great job!

Having spent over 10 years now working as an IT Professional (and almost all of that working with the IBM Lotus product portfolio), I'm really excited to see that there are new developers coming out of university that are at least familiar with Lotus (outside of thinking it's the car manufacturer or a trendy nightclub). Combine this with IBM making Lotus Domino Designer free, well - I can't wait to see what these guys can do!