Things I wish some told me when I started my computing degree

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.