tjaard.nl

I am a computing science student. One day I will get a degree and… what then? Quite a long time I had the feeling that I wasn’t actually learning anything useful and that studying was a waste of time. Sure, quite a lot of subjects were interesting, I did learn to program, but… all the time either we went in-depth on really theoratical matters (automata, parsing, Herbrand models) or we skimmed some of the principles of oo programming or working in projects. All around I saw HBO and MBO people developing actual applications all the time; something that is rarely done here on the university.

What’s done is done and the curriculum of computing science at this university won’t change substantially. But with the years I’ve started to truly understand what I’ve actually learned here. Abstraction, modeling, a way of thinking which is taylored towards solving problems of any nature. Taking the courses taught has laid a foundation which is ready to be built on. And the process of building is something I have to do myself. I can come up with ideas, I learned to structure them, but it is my own responsibility to teach myself to shape these ideas into something that actually can be used.

At this time, I am taking a software engineering course, in which I met Marten. Marten is working for Textdrive and got hired after making his own CMS in Ruby on Rails. I’ve looked into Rails, and I like it. So far I’ve done some Java stuff, some low-level C programming on FPGAs and microcontrollers and made a few simple PHP applications for friends that needed a nice website without having to know any HTML. But I never had any mentionable projects for myself, partly because I felt that I was re-inventing the wheel, partly because most implementation was plainly tedious on the platforms that I know. I think that learning Rails will be a great opportunity to quickly give shape to ideas I get and a great way of training programming applications per se. So far I had ideas, thought them over and forgot about them. From now on I’ll at least write them along with some analysis so that I can use them for future reference. Finding the holy grail may be too much to ask, but I guess it won’t hurt to get in shape for a future career ;) .