Re: [PLUG] ideas for class material

[Julien Vehent <julien@linuxwall.info>]

On 22.10.2011 21:44, Andrew Craig wrote:

> my question is exactly what you gave...input. thank you. To clarify, 
> if
> any of you had the opportunity to have input for a class syllabus, 
> what
> would you include.
>
> We all learn differently, some by doing, some by reading and writing,
> some by doing both.
>
> thanks

Allow me to disagree: this is wrong. You need all of them to learn 
properly, especially in computer science. You cannot be a good 
technician/engineer/researcher without:
- reading a shit lot of material, every day, some complex some not, in 
math, physics, electronic, computer architecture, etc...
- building and maintaining infrastructures and dealing with the 
everyday's quirks of it
- writing code and melting your brain trying to find that segfault bug 
somewhere deep in those 2000 lines of C

You can try to do only one of those, and become really good at it.
But one day, you will interview with Google, a place where they only 
hire engineers who know all three extremely well, and you will 
understand how foolish that was. A sysadmin (or Site Reliability 
Engineer as they call them) will ask you to write a quick sort in 
Python, or a developer will come up with a problem that involves TCP 
window scaling.

It's all a matter of how much you want to invest in it. But for a 
student project, try to pick something that has a little bit of all 3:
- a topic that requires reading some theory
- with the possibility to build an infrastructure and test the 
technology
- and some piece of code to analyze and write

And write a paper about it :)


Hope that helps, and good luck with the project.

--
Julien Vehent - http://1nw.eu/!j
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