Recovering From a Computer Science Education

I was originally going to call this "Undoing the Damage of a Computer Science Education," but that was too link-baity and too extreme. There's real value in a computer science degree. For starters, you can easily get a good paying job. More importantly, you've gained the ability to make amazing and useful things. But there's a downside, too, in that you can get so immersed in the technical and theoretical that you forget how wonderful it is to make amazing and useful things. At least that's what happened to me, and it took a long time to recover.

This is a short list of things that helped me and might help you too.

Stay out of technical forums unless it's directly relevant to something you're working on. It's far too easy to get wrapped up in discussions of the validity of functional programming or whether or not Scheme can be used to make commercial applications or how awful PHP is. The deeper you get into this, the more you lose touch.

Keep working on real projects related to your area of interest. If you like designing games, write games. If you like photography, write a photo organizer or camera app. Don't approach things wrong-way-around, thinking that "a photo organizer in Haskell" is more important than "a photo organizer which solves a particular problem with photo organizers."

If you find yourself repeatedly putting down a technology, then take some time to actually learn and use it. All the jokes and snide remarks aside, Perl is tremendously useful. Ditto for PHP and Java and C++. Who wins, the person who has been slamming Java online for ten years or the author of Minecraft who just used the language and made tens of millions of dollars?

Don't become an advocate. This is the flipside of the previous item. If Linux or Android or Scala are helpful with what you're building, then great! That you're relying on it is a demonstration of its usefulness. No need to insist that everyone else use it, too.

Have a hobby where you focus the end results and not the "how." Woodworkers can become tool collectors. Photographers can become spec comparison addicts. Forget all of that and concern yourself with what you're making.

Do something artistic. Write songs or short stories, sketch, learn to do pixel art. Most of these also have the benefit of much shorter turnaround times than any kind of software project.

Be widely read. There are endless books about architecture, books by naturalists, both classic and popular modern novels, and most of them have absolutely nothing to do with computers or programming or science fiction.

permalink January 15, 2012

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