Joel Grossberg's comment in Ian Bicking's post on Joel Spolsky's article reminds me: my college, Reed, didn't have a CS department or curriculum. There were two intro programming classes, but that was it.

Despite this lack of formal CS education, Reed graduated Keith Packard (X-anything), Nelson Minar (emacs HTML mode, among other things), and half-a-dozen other excellent programmers. Well, and Steve Jobs, too ;).

Just thought I'd mention it.

The Tom Peters Blog Challenge

Via this blog, John O'Leary asks:

1. What's the most important thing you've done this year?

Attending the Woods Hole Embryology Course was definitely the most important thing I did.

Computationally, I'd have to say that twill is probably the most important thing I did. Sigh, it's the first year in a while that some component of my research programming isn't the most important thing I've done, but I'm avoiding that in an effort to actually graduate.

2. What's the most important thing you'll do in the next year?

Graduate, I hope -- or leave graduate school in some way. I'm stuck in a miserable situation where fairly slow experiments are dictating my future. I'm applying for jobs, but without the experimental evidence I'm going to have a tough time of it.

In addition, our Agile Development & Testing project could turn into something quite nice, but I refuse to depend on that ;).

Also, three posts -- Dave Winer (on RSS), Ian Bicking (with his Python docs stuff), and Jonathan Ellis (on ORM stuff) -- have made me decide that one New Year's resolution (category: "programming") will be to learn to play better with other projects. In particular, I'd like to put together a Trusted Commentary application that uses the Advogato trust metric together with Commentary and a simple central-server-based commenting setup to make it easy to deploy a commenting system on individual sites. I'd also like to see if I can integrate cucumber2 ideas into SQLAlchemy or PyDO. We'll see how well these projects go ;).

--titus