10 things learned in professional software development

Abhijit of ifacethoughts points to Andrés Taylor’s reflection on ten years of professional software development, which in turn took inspiration from Michael McDonough’s Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School. Quite a trail of thought, but there are some good ideas in there. Enumerated list of headings follows.

Object orientation is much harder [...]

Earning real world programming experience with the Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code 2007 is on, and are now accepting student applications for the program. What exactly is GSoC? Chris DiBona explains:

Last year we paid 630 students from 450 schools in 90 countries $4,500 each to work on open source software projects. These projects, selected by some 100 open source mentoring organizations from over [...]

Programming your way out of too much homework

A seemingly common high school math homework practice is to assign crunch assignments. Pages and pages of repetitive homework questions, essentially asking the same thing, but with different numbers. Arguably designed to reinforce a concept via a lot of repetitive practice (even though studies suggest that too much homework is counterproductive and lowers test scores). [...]