Free School - mo khan

So it's Friday night and what could be more fun then reading through the MIT Open Course Ware?

One of the first PDF's I cracked open was on getting set up. It started off with a discussion on getting to know your IDE, then your version control and finally your unit testing framework. Did you hear me? This is what you learn at the start of the course, it's almost dumb silly but I unfortunately this isn't the norm in school today. At my first programming job, I remember asking "what's source safe?" I was fresh out of school and had no concept of what source control was. I can now appreciate how important it is to get to know your IDE, your version control (subversion yay, source safe boo!), and of course unit testing frameworks. By the way this MIT course was from 2 years ago... Those MIT grads must be so far ahead of the average grad.

As I was reading through some of the material I gathered some notes and quotes that I found uber helpful. Some of it is listed below:

"I concluded that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make is so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

How to 'Keep is simple, stupid' (KISS)

avoid clever hacks, complex algorithms & data structures
don't use most obscure programming language features
don't optimize until proven necessary
be skeptical of complexity
don't be overambitious: spot 'creeping featurism' and the 'second system effect'.

"...it's easy to make something complicated, but hard to make something truly simple."

So my SAIT courses are almost wrapped of for the year, and I've been thinking about what kind of schooling I want to do next year. MIT Open Course Ware here I come!

P.S. If you're into jungle, I just found a pretty fresh collection of jungle beats!