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.

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