I hated school. Technically, I’m still enrolled in college. Bachelors
of Business Management. Blech. I figured at least with business, I would
learn something useful later in life. I chose against Comp. Sci. for a few reasons.
One being that I know a couple PhD’s that know nothing about building applications
in the real world.
In Comp. Sci., you learn how to build data structures, and how to make Mandelbrot
Set’s process faster. In business, you learn why people buy stuff.
Or more appropriately, you learn how to get people to buy your stuff.
Seeing as I learned (taught myself?) about things like linked-lists and pointers while
in grade 10-ish, and wrote/re-wrote/re-re-wrote Mandelbrot Set builders as a final
project in grade 11, I think I can safely say I would be bored as all hell in University.
Not to mention all the theory. Comp. Sci. is all about theory. Maybe 10%
is actually coding. F-that.
Business is inherently hands-on.
I like hands-on. It’s tangible.
The only problem I had was finding resources. My programming teachers were pretty
cool, and were always willing to help me on algorithms that confused me, as well as
extra-curricular programs when something just wasn’t jiving. But I had cool
teachers. Not everyone is as lucky as I was. And with the teachers, they
weren’t thinking in C# or ASP.NET everyday like I tended to do. Trying to ask
them why something trivial like
<asp:TextBox ID="txtUsername">
didn’t compile was kinda painful. I usually got a response along the lines of
“what’s the colon for?”. I always felt funny trying to explain the quasi-xml
structure of ASP.NET to teachers. This left me in a lame position of needing
to find help. Forums are great, but separating the wheat from the chaff is a
waste of time. Enter stackoverflow.com (4
years late, mind you) and you get answers quickly. I like it. I use it
all the time. I’d like to think that those who are willing to look for resources
will find the site fairly easily. However, there is another site out there that
not too many people know about. It’s the Microsoft
Student Experience site. Yeah yeah, brain wash them early. I drank
the kool-aid early.
Part of the website is dedicated to the DreamSpark program.
Free, fully-licensed Microsoft products. Nuff said.
The other half of the site is dedicated to students. Good thing, given the name.
Not just students studying software development either. All students.
It provides tangible resources for students. Stories, tutorials, and templates
look to be the main content. It’s all surprisingly good stuff too. It
ranges from school studies to general life, to post-school life.
These resources may help those students who are struggling with school – at any level.
There are students out there with lots of potential. Let’s not see it go to
waste.
