Three months ago, I was teaching a class on Fundamentals of Software Engineering. This course has a module on Software Architecture, which I typically teach from the Carnegie Mellon SEI perspective. After teaching it a few times, I had been thinking about better ways to transition students from the “computer-science-first”, code-driven perspective they have when they get to this course, to the more abstract level of thought desirable to properly grasp and reason about software architecture in a structured fashion. Read on to find out how I reached out to another engineering discipline to achieve this.
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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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