Some months ago I had the chance to teach University students about how we develop in the real world, as part of a “companies’ seminars” event.
There is an ongoing discussion in our industry: Do you need a major in Computer Science to become a successful developer?. People say that the subjects explained in the University become outdated quickly, basically due to the lightning speed of technology. People say that nowadays joining a course on javascript is enough to learn to program. Other people say that you must spend 4~5 years in University.
I’m on the side of the need for formal University education. Students need foundations to perfectly understand how things really work. But it’s true that they also need to know how the industry really work. Virtualization, code versioning, code quality (“clean”), tradeoffs, etc, are subjects that are not taught in University, unluckily.
During the seminar I taught students about general subjects like the tradeoffs we have to choose in our company, but also about last trending technologies like docker. Anyhow the most loved subject by them was my introduction to clean code, that opened their eyes. Let’s hope this will inspire them.
Here are the links to the slides I used:
– Professional development
– Clean Code
– OOP and SOLID principles
– Introduction to docker
– Seminar conclusion
The best advice I gave them: Find a job in a company where you can learn.