Mark Lyn­der­say

The four young men hud­dle in the small room ner­vous­ly. It's star­tling how young they all seem in the tiny meet­ing room on the cam­pus of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the South­ern Caribbean (USC).

They form an awk­ward row in front of me, group­ing shoul­der to shoul­der to face ques­tions from the press.

It's at that point that I re­alise they aren't life­long bud­dies, but it's hard to imag­ine, even in the face of all that self-con­scious shuf­fling, that they hadn't worked to­geth­er as a team un­til a cou­ple of weeks be­fore Mi­crosoft's Tech Day & App De­vel­op­ment Chal­lenge bare­ly a month be­fore.

Ky­rone Smith and Chi­ka Ib­neme at­tend­ed the brief­ing that Mi­crosoft held on the cam­pus for po­ten­tial par­tic­i­pants and Smith be­gan think­ing right af­ter­ward of a good team for the event.

Ib­neme was an al­most im­me­di­ate first choice. The two had done In­tro­duc­tion to Pro­gram­ming and then the Comp­Sci 1 and 2 class­es to­geth­er.

They both agreed on Akel Nick­les, an old­er stu­dent who had known them both from his two years as a com­put­er stud­ies teach­ing as­sis­tant.

Christo­pher Adolph found out while brows­ing his Face­book stream and saw a re­quest from Smith for any­one at the school who was in­ter­est­ed. He re­spond­ed im­me­di­ate­ly.

Adolph and Nick­les came in cold to Project Siena (http://ow.ly/ws­MM8), the new tech­nol­o­gy that Mi­crosoft was in­tro­duc­ing.

Siena is a Win­dows 8 ap­pli­ca­tion that al­lows both pro­gram­mers and non-pro­gram­mers to cre­ate apps that har­ness the pow­er of cor­po­rate da­ta and con­tent, as well as Web ser­vices.

For the App De­vel­op­ment Chal­lenge, teams from four com­pet­ing uni­ver­si­ties (UTT, UWI, SBCS were the oth­ers) were chal­lenged to build an app in Win­dows in two hours and then do the same in An­droid.

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