The Missing Sememster of CS degree is actually the missing one for my coursework in CS degree. It is a good chance for anyone who has a CS degree to brush up his or her idea about tools behind the Computer Science. Absolutely it would be the perfect course for students who are now learning CS.
Here is the course structure, they cover a bunch of useful tools that are indeed beneficial to our development journey.
Course Structure
- Shell
- Vim
- Data manipulation
- Commandline environment
- Git
- Debuging, logging, profiling
- Makefiles
- Security
- Miscellaneous
Motivation
Now I am using vim to write the post. Although sometimes it took me a bit longer to edit, I feel I am doing faster and better. As the instructor in the course showed, it should take about 20 hours for us to get back the editing speed in a new editor. After 20 hours, every minute faster is the actual gain.
Beside the speed increasing, using “hacker” tool may help us to code in a positive way: explore and learn to reduce repetitive actions. I guess that is the biggest reason that we use computer. Computers save us already great amount of time, but there are way more to save! I can feel that there are still a lot redundant and repetitve actions during the development, and that is the motivation for more tools to come. For us, it is the first step to keep searching and practicing the useful tools, breaking the fear of steep learning curve. It is the first 20 hours that hinges us to the more productive and hacking work style.
Here is the motivation from the course instructor, maybe one will get a more interesting point from there.
Anyway, I will try to start. As a concrete action, I will post following up posts to finish the exercises in the course, and hopefully find more useful resources to add.