Corporate and academic goals seem to fundamentally differ. One is the pursuit of money while the other is the pursuit of knowledge. Looking at it this way, they may seem strange bedfellows indeed. But consider for a while the old saying “knowledge is power.” Since power often refers to money, and money is needed to […]

When classes come to an end professors and students alike become tired and in need of vacations. We’re all people after all. While it is usually good for teachers to be empathetic to students wanting to leave as soon as possible after classes end, a terrible situation often arises, as it did this semester for […]

Just as the moon waxes and wanes, projects start and draw to a close. This week our team submitted the  final iteration to our website. It was somewhat sad, but not really. It was a big relief: for better or worse we finished. The positive side of this conclusion is that I no longer have […]

This past week, a former student of Downing’s and employee of a company called The Zebra came to talk about his experience of the software development process. After talking about the benefits of code review he told us about his software development history. He had interned at a large company (Amazon, if I recall correctly), then […]

Small projects are fun. They’re good for illustrating most concepts, design tactics and technologies. But this week I learned a lesson that could only be taught through a large project: division of labor. A skilled carpenter can make a lot of things: carts, chairs, tables and even houses. This is how it was in small […]

For this past week the teaching has been extremely hetrogenous. Let me explain. On one hand we’re learning Django completely through actually programming, while conversely, we are learning SQL completely through lecture–no actual running of code is expected. This learning how to theoretically write code harks back to a past era–specifically the era of computing […]

Web development can be extremely fun: designing a RESTful API, using some frameworks to do most of the heavy-lifting and getting to see your content live on the web. So fun in fact that I’ve done something similar before, outside of class (albeit with different collaborators and different frameworks), before I was assigned this task […]

“Leaders required.” This should be on a sign posted in our classroom. In our next group project we were asked to pick groups. After that, leaders for each stage for the project. Forming a group of six who will work together for the remainder of the semester on a project, each supporting the other, each […]

The syllabus is a piece of paper. A description, a schedule, a grading overview. Very little information about what a course is really about is conveyed. Perhaps the most important part is usually left out and leaved to be inferred by students during the course of the semester: what does the professor value? This inference […]