It has been a long time since I posted anything here.
I recently had the pleasure of giving a talk at Middlesex University, for students at the start of their CS degree. It was a really nice experience.
I was wondering what would be useful things for them to hear and wound up talking to them a little about:
- Languages/runtimes: Pascal, Delphi, VB, .net and the JVM.
- OO and FP
- Tooling and how much it changed over time
and then I mentioned a few things that I think I would have liked to know:
- The importance of learning to read code.
- The importance of learning to debug code.
- Context is what makes a solution good (or bad).
- Side projects help you learn a lot.
These are things that sound really obvious in retrospect, I do wonder what it sounded like to them.