This document outlines essential skills and concepts that IT students should be taught, including source control, bug tracking, using compilers properly, automation testing, defensive programming, and soft skills like teamwork and open source contribution. It emphasizes practical skills like maintaining repeatable processes with makefiles and serious code editing tools. Students should learn core development practices like Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) and thinking about full project and business needs rather than just individual assignments.

1. What schools should
be teaching IT students
Andy Lester, andy@theworkinggeek.com
http://theworkinggeek.com

2. Andy Lester
• 23 years in software development and
management
• Author, Land The Tech Job You Love
• Many friends made sure their pet peeves
were in here. We thank you for listening.
• I welcome comments and follow-up at
andy@theworkinggeek.com

3. Tools of the trade

4. Source control

5. Source control
• Branching
• Merging
• Team-based
• How to write a commit message

6. Bug tracking

7. The compiler

8. The compiler
• Turn on all warnings by default
• Warnings are good
• gcc is amazing
• 90% of what a good lint does
• Highly tuned and optimized code

9. The compiler
• Perl: use strict; use warnings;
• PHP: set_error_reporting( E_ALL );
• gcc: -Wall -Wextra compiler flags

10. Make, and
the philosophy of
repeatability

11. Lint / splint

12. Serious editing

13. Serious editing
• vim
• emacs
• TextMate
• Eclipse
• Not notepad for God's sake

14. Concepts

15. DRY:
Don't
Repeat
Yourself
"Every piece of knowledge must
have a single, unambiguous,
authoritative representation
within a system."

16. Defensive programming

17. Maintenance

18. The vision

19. Actual first project

20. How about...?
• Your assignment is code that does such-and-
such.
• It will be based on one of your classmates'
previous assignments.
• You may not disparage your classmate's
work.

21. Manual testing
Automated testing

22. "Efficiency"
and why it (usually)
doesn't matter

23. Thinking business

24. Thinking "Project"

25. Thinking "release"

26. Thinking deadlines

27. A project is a set of
code at a point in time.

28. How about...?
Your assignment is code that does such-and-
such. Your deliverables are:
• Code that will compile + build without
warnings under GCC 4.2 and GNU Make.
You must use -Wall and -Wextra.
• URL pointing to the class git repository that
I can pull down and build using setup.sh.

29. Full project lifecycle

30. Building for the future
and
YAGNI

31. Good enough
and
not being sloppy

32. Soft skills

33. Teamwork

34. Culture

35. You are not the
smartest one.

36. "If we don't do it my
way, we might as well
not do it at all."

37. How else can
they learn?

38. Get into open source

39. Open source work is
real work.

40. Students will learn
• How to work with difficult people
• Source control
• Dev with disparate teams
• Project lifecycle: new features, bugs, etc
• Test-driven development
• How to work with difficult people

41. They will NOT learn
• Thinking Business
• Thinking about deadlines
• Working with a boss

42. Experience on the
resumé

43. Sample code for a
portfolio

44. Missing textbooks
• The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andy Hunt
and Dave Thomas
• Code Complete, 2e, by Steve McConnell

45. andy@theworkinggeek.com
http://theworkinggeek.com