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A few papers that changed my life were the ones about distributed, no sql databases (cassandra, consistent hashing, dynamodb, map reduce, etc). But I would not
by santiagobasulto 5y ago
A few papers that changed my life were the ones about distributed, no sql databases (cassandra, consistent hashing, dynamodb, map reduce, etc). But I would not recommend them to anybody else, I was just useful to me as at the time. I was a CS student in Argentina, studying in a very old fashioned university. The coding exams were done ON PAPER in a Pascal-flavored pseudo code.
When I found and started reading those papers it was like finding life in another planet. It completely changed my way of thinking. I dropped out school and focused on learning as much of the cool stuff as possible (on the internet). It payed off well :)
- nobody0 5y agoI found that the traditional way of doing computing education is actually the way to go. Like what you've described as working out things on paper. Computing Science should not have deep dependencies on certain tide of computing devices(be it hardware or software). Instead computing conceptual models should be taught, so that students are better equipped with those ideas to express them and find transformations and implementations when needed. Though certain getting hands dirty coding is also needed, but all too often we kind of thinking in a tool users' manner.
- santiagobasulto 5y agoI agree with "back to the foundations", and I've done a lot of those. But there should be a mix. My source is: I can show you where all my classmates ended up (spoiler, NOT great).
- hutzlibu 5y agoI like working with pen and paper in programming a lot. And I agree that it helps for learning and really understanding. But at some point, if you want to educate people to build real working products, in the real world - and this is what the vast majority of CS students are going to do - then you have to teach also exactly this. How to build things for real and not just thinking about how to build things.
- nobody0 5y agoYeah, I guess the tension between pen/paper and concrete computer programming is elastic, somehow it depends on the person's willingness to have them growing or static. I appreciate more about some theory when I've programmed mechanically for a while. And I also found writing some code to be relieving when I drank too much theoretical kool-aid.
- antihero 5y agoWhere is the feedback loop with paper? Seems like it would be biased towards a certain type of coder, as opposed to one that likes to play around with stuff to problem solve.