When I was a student at CMU, I thought of MIT as the school we wanted to compete with but who didn’t know who we were. It was kind of like picking a fight with someone twice your size: it’s not that you’d lose, it’s that they didn’t even care. So visiting MIT was a thrill: I’d read so much about the place, and the legendary hacks, that I had fun just walking around on campus. (It’d make an interesting contrast a few days later when I spoke at CMU).

I walked the 15 minutes from the ever swanky hotel Marlowe and met Daniel Jackson from the CS department. The Strata center, where his office is, is a wild Ghery designed skyline of buildings and it was a trippy thing to see early in the day. Jackson and I chatted about teaching programming and organizing teams, but soon I had to run off to talk at the Sloan school.

I had no idea what to expect: I’m entirely depedent on my host at each of these gigs to promote or advertise the talk, and for this one I expected to 8 or10 people and a small room, for an informal chat. Well, I was wrong. Yuntao Edward Shi (of the mediatech club), my host, filled the medium size room with nearly 100 MBA students. I was late to the building and scrambled to find the room, and had a sureal moment of “that room is really crowded it can’t be it. Wait. That’s it.”

Sticking with my plan I kept the talk informal. After a brief intro I asked the crowd what they wanted to talk about and let them veto entire sections from my slides. It was great. Someone asked about anti-trust, another about managing people smarter than you and the session just flew by. These guys are smart: looking forward to seeing what they do after they leave Sloan.

At 12:59pm we were kicked out by some TAs setting up for an exam. I had flashblacks to scrawling long missives in those little blue books they make you write in. I smiled inside, being so happy to never ever have to take an exam again.

The next talk at MIT wasn’t until 4:30pm. Robbie Allen, esteemed O’Reilly author and the man who made the talk possible, met me for lunch. Then I had two hours to kill before the next lecture on why software sucks.