Most important and useful CS courses?

turbo93
Fri, 17 May 2013 21:14:28 +0000

Software engineering is evil on two fronts.

First, it allows people who are non-coders to direct / schedule / project / forecast how long things should take, how they should be done, the level of detail, level of testing, and so on. Not so, kids. Agile came along to provide a bottom-up view of the world from the trenches.

Second, an entire industry has sprung to support education as well as tools and methods focused on NON-CODING. Coding itself is the last activity, outsourced to some remote country with a once-a-week connection to the US via Elbonia. Not so, once again.

Last year we completed an incredibly agile methodology project that was the most complex thing the company had done - ever - by a mile. It worked fine and you can buy it at fine retailers everywhere :). Agile with maybe 120 developers in a dozen teams, and two project managers, and lots of paid overtime and free food.

What saved the project? Architecture, that’s what. Two ‘old school’ guys from directional state universities and 60 years of coding experience between them created a Linux based framework that allowed everything to play together. All apps, from media to bluetooth to what not were fairly similar in coding and with little effort we could work on a lot of different parts of the system. Very little ‘documentation’ - mostly UML style diagrams that were obsolete the day we wrote them… Lots of old style software development, nothing fancy.

Right now I’m working on an agile R&D project that is purely science fiction. Fantasy. It’s all 50-year olds coding with 25 year old project managers (not the other way round). By definition we make things up as we go along the customer (who’s paying for the work to see if it can be done). Other than agile, our custom framework, Linux, and a couple of basic tools, it’s all non-software-engineering, just good ole’ coding.

Best part: all the gadget-to-cloud code is straight Unix/Linux sockets code, much like the code I wrote in the mid 80’s :). Gotta love progress.