Bryn Athyn College
Commencement
T
he Bryn Athyn College of the New Church commencement address was
presented by Colin Cole, who received an Associate Degree from the
College in 1989. He went on to earn a BA in Economics from the University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a Master’s in Theoretical Computer Science
from DePaul University in Chicago in 1996. He has worked for Microsoft for
the past 17 years as an Architect Director. He also has qualified for the Boston
Marathon next year. He lives in Glenview with his wife and three children.
Following are major excerpts from his address:
Although some of you think you’re finishing college
today, college never really ends.
In my early days working at Microsoft, I had my hand
in product development, building software, with products
called BizTalk Server and Microsoft SOAP toolkit. Today I
specialize in cloud computing, specifically with Microsoft’s
cloud platform: Microsoft Azure.
This is a world-wide group of 11 (and growing) large
datacenters, placed strategically around the world, where
Bryn Athyn College
companies can literally run their business with technology
commencement
that can scale elastically. We do massive scale computing.
address was
presented by Colin
Azure was the host site for the Sochi Olympics for all of the
Cole, Architect
internet event broadcasting by NBC. The U.S. vs. Canada
Director for Micosoft
hockey game actually broke the record for the largest-ever
live streamed event over the internet.
The computer industry has always been one of constant change. Cloud
computing ushers in this change more rapidly than before. The challenge is
that it’s predicated on the notion of continuous innovation. We continually
innovate the platform. Every 30 or so days we announce a slew of feature
enhancements and updates. I am constantly learning; probably 50% of my
time is spent studying/learning stuff I didn’t know today, but will need to be
an expert in tomorrow.
This is not just true with my industry. Pretty much every job requires a
ton of on-the-job learning. One of the most important aspects of what you’re
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