Developing better developers
My name is Dave Winer. I have a MS degree in Computer Science. It was totally worth it, I got a foundation in operating systems and languages, but -- it only taught me a portion of what I needed to make products real users love. The experience sent me into the world thinking I knew better than those who came before me, which of course wasn't true. #
That's because in university we only worked on student projects. These products don't have users, or competition, and the platform vendor never deprecates an API you depend on. And that's just the beginning! There are no docs, QA, tech support, demos, marketing or interop issues. We never had to worry about breaking users, or whether users would understand what we're doing.#
Imagine if, instead, we taught developers by having them work in the equivalent of a working hospital, on real products with real users, with new versions that have to maintain compatibility with previous versions. Performance matters. Confused users matter. Getting creamed by the competition matters. And ethics matter too.#
We couldn't agree more.