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The real skill I try to teach my pupils, when joining top down ICT skills to bottom up CS / hacker skills, is to be able to re use existing tools in new and cre
by gorgoiler 6y ago
The real skill I try to teach my pupils, when joining top down ICT skills to bottom up CS / hacker skills, is to be able to re use existing tools in new and creative ways.
This is especially applicable if you learn a bunch of generic “everything is a text file” hacker skills, maybe with a little code on top.
Could you manage the crematorium using YAML files edited in GitHub? Maybe. Any collaborative tool with tagging can usually be beaten hard enough with a hammer to turn it into something useful in a specific domain.
We make pens and paper and do all sorts of specific business with these generic tools. Encouraging the generic use of computers might seem like dragging us back to the 1980s, but it’s how these tools were meant to be used!
- jamieweb 6y agoI definitely agree with you in regards to the "everything is a text file" thing, but the average computer user doesn't know how to properly utilise text files and manage them effectively. This is similar to the fact that basic knowledge of file systems and file formats is lacking in many modern teenagers, because this is all abstracted away by smartphone apps and cloud storage. As a tech guy, I'd love to run the crematorium using YAML files in GitHub, but the reality is that the target audience for the system is Funeral Directors and Cremation Assistants, so it needs to be a non-technical user interface.