Notes

Recovering from a Computer Science Education

I was originally going to call this "Undoing the harm of the Computer Science Education," but that was too link-baity, and too extreme. A degree in computer science is extremely valuable. For starters, you can easily find a decently-paid job. You've also had the ability to create amazing and useful things. However, there is a downside to this too. It's easy to get caught up in the technical and theoretical aspects that it's easy to forget that it is to create beautiful and useful things. This happened to me at least, and it took some time to recover.



This is a short list of things that helped me and could be helpful to you as well.



If it's directly related to the subject you're working on, avoid technical forums. It's easy to get caught up in discussions of the value of functional programming, whether or not Scheme can be used to develop commercial applications or how awful PHP is. The more you get involved in this the more you lose touch.



Continue to work on real projects related to your area of interest. If you like designing games, write games. Create an organizer for your photos. It's not necessary to believe that a photo organizer in Haskell is more important than one that solves an issue specific to photo organizers.



If you find yourself repeatedly in the process of slamming technology, then it's worth taking the time to actually learn it and use it. Perl is an extremely useful tool, despite all the jokes and snide remarks. The same is true for PHP and Java and C++. Who is the winner who is the one who has been bashing Java on the internet for 10 years or the developer of Minecraft who has just used the language and earned tens of millions of dollars?
games


Don't become an advocate. This is the reverse of the previous point. If Linux, Android, or Scala could be useful in the creation of your project then that's great! It's an indication of its utility that you depend on it. It's not necessary to insist that everyone else use it, too.



Concentrate on the end product and not the "how" of your passion. Woodworkers can become tool collectors. Photographers can become obsessed with the spec comparison. Don't get caught up in that and concern yourself with the images you're creating.



Do something artistic. Learn to pixel-art or write songs or short stories. These projects also have a faster time to complete than any other type of software project.



Be a reader. There are many books on architecture, naturalists popular novels and all of them aren't related to programming or science fiction.



permalink January 15, 2012.



Previously



Follow-up to "A Programming Idiom That You've Never Heard of"A Programming Idiom That You've Never Heard Of2011 RetrospectiveUser experience intrusions in 5Photography on iOS as a non-technical Hobby Archives



Twitter / Mail



James Hague is a recovering programmer who has been making video games since the 1980s. Programming without Being Obsessed with Organizational and Programming Skills beat Algorithmic Wizardry could be good starting points. The 2012 Retrospective is a great option for older material.


Here's my website: https://s-games.net/