I’ve long held the view that concerts are for fans. By this I mean hard-core fans. There’s no place in a concert for people who casually consume the artist’s music. No, you need to know all songs by heart, even with different arrangements, the idiosyncrasies of the band when touring: the symbols, the antics… You need to be deeply invested into a band or artist in order to make it be worthwhile the minor ordeal that attending a concert usually involves.
At least that’s my opinion. And for somewhat similar reasons, I think similarly about developer conferences: generally speaking, they’re more of a hassle than they’re worth. Read on to find out my argument before you think I’m just older and bitter than I should.
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As head of the Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering degree at the Santo Domingo Institute of Technology (INTEC), one of the questions I field more often is the difference between this degree and our BSc in Computer Science. This second degree is actually named “Information Systems Engineering” (both at INTEC and generally at all Dominican universities), but is typically accredited as a BSc in CS internationally; a recent curricular reform may change that, though, as it is now based on the ACM/IEEE guidelines for Information Systems programs. I have a variety of resources to answer the question of how they differ, but recently drew on a long tradition of cooking and software development parallels and came up with an explanation that seems to satisfy people more than previous ones.
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