Comments on: What could be done to improve CS Degrees (Part 2)

By: Shyam

Shyam — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:27:14 +0000

Git does rock. Probably a great topic for another blog post

By: Anil

Anil — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:04:56 +0000

Two things I think I missed in my Masters degree (and being a kernel developer now) is:

1. Lack of inception into debugging tools like gdb, kdb or OOPS. If a student gets introduced to something like this, I am sure his productivity would increase a lot. This usually isn’t the case with app layer dev with java / web-dev, but talking at the arch layer, these small tools make your life easier.

2. Many of the projects would be group projects. Most of the times, the group either does not have a common scratch space and if they do, they are not utilized in the best way possible. Having a source controller like git would help them be “industry-ready” and help coordination and again .. debugging easier !!

By: Allen

Allen — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:11:18 +0000

Very insightful article. But I would like to point out, undergrad classes that cover some of these things do exist. In the new MIT EECS curriculum, the foundation class 6.005 (Principles of Software Development) focus very heavily on interfaces, decoupling, maintainability, unit testing and extensive documentation.
However, I do think it is difficult teaching testing in undergrad classes. Imagine that you’ve finally finished a huge project and can go to sleep, the Unit tests that are required would certainly seem like an annoyance and be written as an after-thought.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 03:52:50 +0000

What’s interesting about your post is that everything you mentioned is being covered in the Master’s program that I’m currently taking. You essentially covered the first year of coursework, while the second year will cover project management, software architecture, and some other interesting courses.

What’s frustrating is that I agree with you–it seems that much of this knowledge would have been far more valuable as an undergrad, before I had plenty of experience to draw on.

Still, at least some colleges are making strides in the right direction. I think this also shows that you’re on the right track…as computer scientists, we need to push at least some of this information down to the undergrad level.

By: Problems with the Education of Computer Professionals – Cynical Heretic

Problems with the Education of Computer Professionals – Cynical Heretic — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:22:23 +0000

[...] across a couple of posts by Shyam over at The Shyam! expressing concerns on the same topic here and here. The focus of our discussion was different than Shyam’s but the underling frustrations are [...]