The skills that software developers learn in college aren't enough to get them to hit the ground running when they get out in the real world. As a hiring manager, these are things I thought they'd be taught.

1. What I wish colleges
taught developers
Andy Lester, @petdance, andy@petdance.com
Dev Together Chicago, Oct 9, 2018

2. Where I'm coming from
32 years of software development
Manager, team leader, hire programmers
I spend a lot of time on StackOverflow
(#1288 of all time)

3. Tools of the trade

4. Version Control Systems
Branching
Merging
Using VCS as a team
How to write a commit message

5. Serious editing
vim
emacs
Atom
Eclipse
Not Notepad for God's sake

6. Let the language help
gcc warnings -Wall and -Wextra
JavaScript 'use strict'
PHP's error_reporting(E_ALL);
Perl's use warnings; use
strict;

7. Make, shell scripts,
and repeatability
Computers do the drudge work.
Humans do the thinking.

8. Debugging
How to find programming problems, methodically
narrowing them down to the core cause.

9. Defensive
programming
What do you do when
"that can never happen" happens?

10. Testing
Thinking in terms of causing problems
Manual testing
Unit testing
Continuous integration

11. How to think about
efficiency

12. Most of the time it
doesn't matter

13. Thinking "project"
and "release"
If you don't release your project, nobody can use it.

14. Working with
existing code

15. This is what you write in school

16. This is your first project on the job
"Look into ticket #3481 and see if you can fix it"

17. Clear technical
communication
In everything you do, whether in English or in a
computer language

18. What can you do to
fill in these gaps?

19. Two missing textbooks

20. Open source hones
these skills
Working with distributed teams
Source control
Project lifecycle: New features, bugs,
releases, etc
Test-driven development
Written communication

21. Thank you for your time
Andy Lester, @petdance on Twitter
blog.petdance.com

22. Two competing
misconceptions of
beginning programmers

23. You have to have everything
memorized, and if you look
it up you're a loser.
All you have to do is look
things up on the Internet
and use those answers.