Developing Upwards

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools What's the Point? Some opinions, while held, are held softly. I believe the understanding is the opinion changes nothing and you aren't doing anything about it, so giving a damn is pointless. You may call it apathy, but I call it misunderstanding the nature of information. Information spreads from those who have it to those who do not and those in agreement grease the wheels of that distribution. Of course, there are good developers who don't care if there are bad developers. I'm not convinced they're still reading, at this point. If they are, then the reasons we can make a difference should help convince you to care about that difference in the first place. The more widely held the beliefs that we can and should do something to improve the quality of this industry, the more likely anything will happen. You might not be lecturing in the class...

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Doctors and lawyers in the United States have the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association, respectively, and surely have analog organizations in other countries. As representatives of their professions, they work collectively with their colleagues at a reasonable and useful goal: quality control. It is in the interest of doctors that their med students are not idiots. It is in the interest of lawyers that their opponents are not (more) unethical. There are other, perhaps less admirable uses of these controls (too many doctors would lower all their salaries). There is no such quality control in our industry. We have individuals at the lowest end of the ability spectrum and at the highest peaks of skill, and, we have the teaches of many years of expensive higher educations on some of our shoulders and only the passion of self-teaching for oth...

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro...