I could add, one course or two about "communications" the one with people in. Most of us will spend our times in teams, with highly opinionated and sometimes conflicting individuals. Computer programmers don't know how to listen or to respond, we mostly just react.
The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
101–110 of 200 posts
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#102Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding…
I’d recommend Docker / virtual machines as its own top-level module. There’s essentially no better way than containers to make projects portable and reproducible, and containers are now essential for pretty much any production system. I’ve taught docker to a few dozen people and while they hate it at first (the learning curve can be steep) they love it in the end.
Also wish this course covered bazel, maybe in potpourri. Make is important and bazel isn’t standard but bazel is pretty important for large C++ projects.
Docker and bazel both have fairly complicated interfaces and the time set aside for a course like this is the perfect time to play with them.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#103Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding…
I'd recommend making a course on how to create a proper Makefile, from the beginning to the advanced level.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#104Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding…
I'd recommend making a course on how to create a proper Makefile, from the beginning to the advanced level.
Makefiles are worse shell scripts. /religion
I do agree with the spirit of this though. There's a big difference between "click a button in your IDE" to compile and learning about all the code-ish things that go into a real software project:
* choosing a build system (and package system too, I guess?)
* setting up CI
* static analysis
* setting up CD
* config-as-code for managing the state of prod
* staging environments?
* production monitoring
* production alerting
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#105Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding…
We previously had the same problem at University of Copenhagen, it was called "the hidden curriculum" among students.
When the undergraduate programme was reformed a few years ago these subjects where integrated into various courses, so they could be taught in a learning-by-doing fashion. As part of the first programming and problem-solving class (F#), we also teach LaTeX, Emacs and basic use of the command line, as part of a project-based software engineering course (second semester) Git is used extensively, and so on.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#106This course is wonderful! I've read through all the material and watched all the lectures and I can say it has helped me tremendously thus far. I'm still trying to master all the tools they've mentioned but I already feel much more proficient with e.g. version control, vim, using the command line, etc. If you're an experienced dev then you might already know all of these things, but if you feel that you have some gap…
If you're an experienced dev, you use all these every single day. God save me if I'm asked to implement quicksort though... theory is nice, but for me, academia largely forgot about this practical stuff.
I missed out on a formal CS education. I found my way, but I always saw it as all of those things you never had time to research deeply. Otherwise, it's just a trade school. For example, you've implemented a few basic sorting algorithms so you feel confident in choosing one or kicking the tires on a new one you've never heard of. Knowing how an OS is put together gives you an idea where things should go.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#107Learning about a command-line debugger and command-line profiling tools would be helpful for those that find themselves in the past. IDEA and Visual Studio have had these things integrated for decades. I find the likelihood of knowing how to use a debugger or profiler is inversely proportional to the amount of time someone spends in the terminal. It's astonishing how many developers rely on logging/print statements f…
> It's astonishing how many developers rely on logging/print statements for debugging. The learning curve of using a tool like PDB or GDB is just too steep for most people.
On the other hand, since I can’t hook up a debugger to production, it’s also very useful to be able to understand my applications log output (especially tracing/debug statements) to triage the situation as quickly as possible.
Also any time I’m debugging USB or Bluetooth LE protocols, I’m relying on some kind of Wiretrace-like packet logger.
Debuggers have their place but they aren’t the end-all be-all of debugging.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Life long vim user that was initiated by the terminal here, vim has a special place in my heart, not because the amount of customization that I was able to add, but because it enabled me to write actual diary. Here's the script. https://github.com/Aperocky/termlife/blob/master/diaryman.sh All I had to do was to type $diary in the terminal and I'm writing my diary in vim. I had never had more extensive record of my li…
I love this! I've been looking for a lighweight diary tool, and this is giving me serious inspiration.
Check out Vimwiki, it has similar functionality and allows hyperlinks to other documents + index page generation
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#109When I was in college, we also followed a "traditional" CS curriculum. The introductory language was Scheme. The language in core courses was C. Advanced courses used whatever was best for the course, usually C or C++. Many of the courses have had the same problem sets since 1985.
At the time, students had problems with it because "how are we supposed to build apps with this knowledge?!" There were even student efforts to "modernize" the curriculum by supplementing it with student run workshops on app building (which actually did really well).
Personally, I really appreciated the curriculum. I was a self taught programmer going into CS, having done lots of web dev and automation stuff with PHP / Python. And I was really cocky about it. But as my adviser told me on my first day, "yes, you're a programmer, but you are not yet a computer scientist." I knew nothing about Computer Science, and had never touched a low level language, because I had no practical reason to. The next four years were valuable for me because they forced me to learn about topics that I will never teach myself.
And you know what? By the time I graduated I was fully proficient with git, python, Javascript, bash, and a whole bunch of other tools and concepts, despite the fact that no class forced me to learn them. I picked them up from working with others, scripting tests for my assignments, and my internships. It also helped to have the foundation of lower level knowledge. It's a lot easier to understand the "magic" of your scripting language when you have an appreciation of what it's actually doing underneath the hood. It's easier to understand bash when you've written a shell in C. Etc.
For me, this approach worked well. School taught me the fundamental concepts that haven't changed since 1985, which means they probably won't change much by 2054, either. Who knows what industry will be using in 2054? I appreciate that the school curriculum prioritized core, fundamental concepts over tooling trends and the language du jour. Yes, it's important to learn those practical skills, but they'll come with practice and experience in industry (especially if you have 3 internships); there's no need to take a class on them. And when the next one comes along, you can learn it in a week. Your knowledge of the fundamentals will help.
Re: The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
#110Over the years, we (@anishathalye, @jjgo, @jonhoo) have helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over we have seen that many students have limited knowledge of the tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and text editors. Common examples include holding…
I think this is an amazing course and indeed missing. I learned the things presented in the course only after graduating CS and working at a company! They (rightly so) thought I was somewhat of a fool because I preferred to use Windows.
One thing on the data wrangling. I do think that the Linux tools are powerful, but would like to give some credits to R here. For example, merging tables (similar to SQL joins) is available in the standard library. This in combination with R Markdown for visualization makes it much more easy to use than Linux CLI tools.