I was raised writing stand-alone applications, but now it's all about containerized, subscription-based cloud apps. What should I be teaching my students?
I recognize that Mastodon may have a certain amount of selection bias.
@peterdrake Mostly I want folks who can communicate technical concepts well, work well with others, and have a couple small projects under their belt where they had autonomy in deciding what to build. The more you can prepare your students on those fronts the more likely I am to hire them. We can train up on any specific tech stack.
@peterdrake ... That said fight the power!
There has always been a natural oscillation between centralized vs. decentralized throughout the history of computing. First it was centralized with large, clunky tube-driving machines. Then terminals began to become more sophisticated pushing things toward decentralization. Eventually those terminals became PCs with standalone applications. Then came networks and the rise of servers, moving back toward centralization again. Now economic, rather than technological drivers are pushing centralization to the extreme.
I think the drivers going forward will be AI, robots and security. With most communication happening between machines rather than people, UI/UX will be deemphasized and AI and machine learning will predominate. Security and political blowback will act as limiters to centralization – people and machines will want to maintain autonomy and security. And teaching how to connect to the hardware will become more important.
@peterdrake Well, I voted and made it 50-50, so Qoto might not have a bias. 😀
I say, teach them to analyse problems, but also analyse languages, tools, system environments. Teach them to be open-minded to ways of approaching problems, but not fall to analysis paralysis.
If they find themselves in an organization of narrow-minded tool bigots, then Fight the Power!
@peterdrake I'm a software engineer who plays a large role in recruiting for web developers and DevOps roles. I really don't want colleges to cover containerization or cloud infrastructure in a hands on way. Writing Dockerfiles and scripting aws are easy to train.
But knowing things like how the internet and the web work, what a load balancer is, etc from school is good. Basics OOP vocabulary often seem missing in our junior candidates.