[AstixAndBelix]

Developers should be force fed nothing, because they "chose" to not follow a formal education. Almost everything I see in these blog posts is stuff I was already taught at college (or very adjacent).

If you want developers to know about this stuff stop encouraging people to go to code bootcamps and start making SWE curricula more palatable and end this idea that college is a scam that teaches you nothing

[dgb23]

I'm an autodidact and a big fan of state machines (specifically mealy machines).

They can easily be expressed as plain data structures of three layers that map the name of a state to possible inputs/events to the appropriate name of the subsequent state. Then you only need code / functions for each transition (from state, to state) to generate effects. This data driven pattern is very straight forward to implement and easy to reason about.

I learned it from hobby game programming, especially its application and usefulness. It comes up in lectures/books, sure, but generally people tend to vastly underestimate its applicability and instead smear state control all over their code, regardless of their education.

[plaguuuuuu]

do you know any examples of code that showcase this pattern really well?

every example I've seen (probably toy examples from articles) felt like way too much abstraction had been applied over the problem.

[redeux]

I’m glad this was your experience, but your school’s CS curriculum isn’t universal.

I was once chatting with a jr sw engineer that had recently graduated from a respectable state university with a CS degree about which database would be optimal for our upcoming project. He confided in me that he hadn’t taken the DB course in school because he heard bad things about the professor who taught it. I was absolutely blown away.

The moral of the story is that your shouldn’t assume that just because someone has a CS degree that they have knowledge of all the fundamental areas.

[lightbendover]

Databases were not part of my CS curriculum until I took an elective web development course at the very end. People struggled. I had been doing hobbyist web development since I was quite young so the whole class was a breeze for me, but I understand that for those who are only taught the fundamentals and theory, anything pragmatic can feel daunting. I'm sure curriculums have changed greatly since I went through (KV/graph stores were not yet adopted, distributed DBs were merely a thought), but it still doesn't feel quite right for faulting a student for choosing certain classes or not being perfectly suited for learning a given domain instantly.

[Version467]

Were you asking him about what kind of db would be best suited for your project (i.e. relational, document based, graph, etc.), or were you asking about specific products, like Postgres vs. Mariadb?

If it was the latter, then I doubt he could have answered that even if he had taken the db course at his college. And that's probably fine, I don't think the differences between specific db products counts as the sort of fundamental knowledge that should be taught at a university.

[rs999gti]

I would take a CS degree with no experience over a boot camp or for profit school's fresh graduate.

At least I know the CS degree has standards and academic rigor, with mathematics and some problem solving, which to me means they can think and adapt.

Once both groups get experience though they are pretty much the same resume wise. Then it is up to the interview process and probation period to shake them out

[gpderetta]

If you can learn this stuff in college it is great, but you can also learn it on your own.

[ly3xqhl8g9]

Certainly doesn't help that colleges that aren't at the MIT/Stanford level have as specified purposes only to provide employment and generate profit through state subsidies, education is a side effect, if at all. It is just luck if at one of these colleges you find a passionate teacher/professor/mentor who has enough time to pay attention to you.

The future of education will be the personal artificial mentor, such as GPT10+ will be able to provide, and then the question becomes: how do you generate internal motivation for the children/people to be interested in knowledge and power over nature instead of being mindlessly entertained by whatever the ad-driven feed displays.

[govolckurself]

Vegetables aren't as great as ice cream, but you need vegetables, even if they aren't "palatable". Let's end the notion that everything in computer science is easy and hip and fun. No, recurrence relations probably aren't the most exciting, but they're important fundamentals. I expect developers to be adults and learn difficult things, even if they're not "palatable".

Agreed, though. We need to stop pretending 12 weeks of JavaScript is at all equivalent to four years of rigorous theory and practice.