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In my second year,
I told my teacher I can code in in C#(c-sharp).
She replied : C-sharp ? Oh you mean C-hash !
*that day I lost hope in college*32 -
I want to pay respects to my favourite teacher by far.
I turned up at university as a pretty arrogant person. This was because I had about 6 years of self-taught programming experience, and the classes started from the ansolute basics. I turned up to my first classes and everything was extremely easy. I felt like I wouldn't learn anything for at least a year.
Then, I met one of my lecturers for the first time. He was about 50~60 years old and had been programming for all of his career. He was known by everyone to be really strict and we were told by other lecturers that it could be difficult for some people to be his student.
His classes were awesome. He was friendly, but took absolutely no shit, and told everything as it was. He had great stories from his life, which he used to throw out during the more boring computer science topics. He had extremely strict rules for our programming style, and bloody good reasons for all of them. If we didn't follow a clear rule on an assignment, he'd give us 0%. To prove how well this worked, nobody got 0%.
We eventually learned that he was that way because he used to work on real-time systems for the military, where if something didn't work then people could die.
This was exactly what I needed. In around one semester I went from a capable self-taught kid, to writing code that was clear, maintainable and fast, without being hacky.
I learned so much in just that small time, and I owe it all to him. So often when I write code now I think back to his rules. Even if I disagree with some, I learned to be strict and consistent.
Sadly, during the break between our first and second year, he passed away due to illness. There was so many lessons still to be learned from him, and there's now no teachers with enough knowledge to continue his best modules like compiler writing.
He is greatly missed, I've never had greater respect for a teacher than for him.21 -
Definitely my security teacher. He actually expected us to actively learn the stuff and put effort into our education. He guided us through malware analysis and reverse engineering, simplifying it without insulting us.
We had students who thought they knew everything and he corrected them. We had arrogant students he put in place.
He treated us like adults and expected us to act like adults.
That's the only class I enjoyed studying for, because he would tell us exactly what wasn't on the exams (it was an intro course, didn't need to know the math). There were no trick questions.
I told him about the shitty teacher and he helped me through that confidence block. He helped me realize I *can* make it through the workforce as a female in security because I will work my ass off to be the best I can be. He reminded me why I love computers and why I want to go into forensics.
He's been a great mentor and role model and hiring him is one of the few things my department did right.7 -
Our Web Technology professor taught us this in the year 2016, he said and I quote,
"HTML frames are the latest technologies in the www and are supported by new generation browsers only, for example Netscape navigator."14 -
A request to all of you posting these feel-good rants about your past teachers.
Maybe shoot them a message to tell them how much you appreciated them, teaching is a very rough and thankless job for the most part.
It's funny how much it meant to some of my past teachers...
4 -
Awesome teacher number two: another Linux teacher!
Didn't have many classes from him but damn he could interact with the students!
He was very open (it just autocorrected that to porn O.o) minded, very passionate about Linux and new shitloads about security. You'd expect him to be like 50 as for his knowledge amounts but he was around 27 I think.
He could go into discussions with students on the windows vs Linux subject, made it look like they were winning and then completely burn them in just a few sentences.
I think he liked me a lot because we would talk all kinds of Linux stuff.
He'd also help people with windows sometimes but windows servers where a very fucking no-go for him.
Man, I miss that guy 😞10 -
Going to have to do multiple rants on this one as I've had three awesome teachers.
Number one: Linux teacher.
He was around his 40's to mid 40's I think and he loved talking to people who also had the same passion (linux) about it.
When we had Linux classes which everyone hated, he'd always let me free. He knew I'd be able to finish the 10 weeks' assignments within an hour or so (took me half an hour instead of 10 lessons) so he just said: go do whatever you want.
Aaaaand instead of doing my own thing I ended up saving the whole class.
Yeah he was a very open minded guy who was awesome with linux/the students.10 -
Last teacher rant from me and this one is about: my mentor.
Let's call him Bob.
He was a person who'd always be ready to help you out, did some lessons on bullying and the effects of it, stood by me many times when I'd have hard times with something I'd trouble and one of the most important things, he had a very good sense of humor!
Also, since I always wore a suit (still do), he introduced 'FaF' day, aka, Fancy as Fuck day. Every Wednesday the guys who wanted to would come in suits.
Yup, he got me through loads of stuff, miss that guy :)7 -
CS lecturer and I were sitting in the canteen trying to discuss something on my laptop. While waiting for it to load this is what we discussed:
Me: funny story, this weekend I was out with my friends an.......
Lecturer: *hang on* ... you have friends?5 -
Once my teacher was taking my viva and she asked me to explain the below line.
Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in)
I told her that this creates a newScanner instance which points to the input stream passed as argument
She shouted at me and said that I am wrong.
She explained to me that this line creates a new object not an instance10 -
My teacher at school who taught me programming. We were taught Java.
You see, Java is not a beginner's language, most say. But the way she taught it, the examples, the analogy, the explanation; she made it so easy.
She made us execute our first Hello World program (using BlueJ) and proudly said, "you're all programmers now!", that was when fascination took me over. I remember that moment till today.
Also, unlike regular exams, the programming exams required extreme competency. Marks were split up for algorithm and syntax. There were also questions like find the error in this algorithm for this output. She would always surprise us at the exams!
I had several glorious moments in class by being the first to answer most of her questions. At 13, it was kind of a big deal for me.
(Okay, who am I kidding, it still is :-P)
*sigh*
It was mostly just self learning from there. I switched schools and then there was college. Attending classes in college was like going to the gym with fat trainers. Utterly useless :-/ It just made me appreciate her even more.6 -
Someone who noticed that I do programming as a hobby and therefore set harder work for me in class. He also encourages my side projects and at the moment is helping me build a native app for the school :)2
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This years~
It’s a class that introduce an introduction to programming.
First weeks of the class.
T: “For those who already know this basic stuff , You can take a final test. If you pass, you get an ‘A’ and dont have to attend to this class for the rest of this term.”
Me: “Fuck yeah~ Let’s do this”
—8 -
Our first programming class was about how to prepare a cup of tea, how to write the pseudo code of this process, then how to write it using any programming language... It was the greatest lecture ever...5
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Our University professors taught us very little. If one wanted to actually learn something they had to go out of their way to learn it. I was one of the few who actually did that and as a result I ended up being the "top coder" in class.
This meant that I developed an ego.
Then came internship. It was two months of systematic breaking me down and building me up again, forcing me to stop thinking of a solution that just works and actually think of a good design to a solution.
I know I still have a long way to go but I know those helped me grow as a developer. -
I had a professor in college who was "the expert in java programming language". He had a unique way of teaching.
P: So you save your java file and run this command.
*Some error occurs*
Me: But this is showing some error
P: Exactly. I wanted to show this exact same error so that you learn that this is not how its done. I will let you figure it out how its done and it will be your assignment for the day. Class dismissed.4 -
In my first semester we had a Hall of Fame for the programming tests and this was the message above the live stream of the class:
2 -
Sorry, but most teachers are foolish and live in the developmental Stone Age. Somehow they have stopped developing and are teaching what they have learned decades ago.3
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The best teacher that I've had is one of the teachers at my university lab.
He teaches Data Structures. We had some programming assignments and I was good at it, but whatever I'd do, he'd always find bugs, ask me to resolve it and he'd always give me challenges in the lab which is fun in the lab environment. University labs usually sticks to the sylabbus. I actually learned alot from that experience..
'Trail and Error is the best method to learn programming.'2 -
Our current programming teacher actually being able to teach us good practices and give us constructive criticism on our code.1
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Not an actual teacher but definitely the guy who thought me the most: @java9
@java9 is a friend of mine who started the apprenticeship with me, but had serval years more of experience than I did.
At first he helped me get through the first complex tasks.
Luckily we are in the same class at professional school, and he helped me studying a lot.
Because of him I was able to develop my skills rather quickly.
Over the years our relationship developed into a close friendship.
Now we are working together as a team on more than side project and I've learned to love his perfectionism when it comes to code.
It's a pleasure to work with you @java9
Thanks for reading fellow ranter, here is a picture of us sharing a beer as a bonus
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When one of CS teachers went to jail for asking money to pass exams.
Defiently an experience for both him and students.2 -
I'm a teacher myself (for basic Html/css/js and sql 101) and there's nothing like the feeling of seeing your pupils progress. Makes me warm inside everytime :3
As a student though, i remember a friend of mine used minecraft and redstone for a logic circuits course. The teacher, which i guess wanted to show himself, was like "Yeaaah right redstone, i was doing that 20 years ago ...". How to loose credibility 1018 -
This is a good Experience -
I used to go to a class to learn C++(was a kid back then).
One of the sir there told me -
"Anybody can write code,just knowing coding is not enough,idea is more important.You should have good ideas and solutions,you can alaways find people to code for you"
This has stuck with me till this day.1 -
The reason I stick around at my current job is thanks to a mentor who has helped me reach greater potential.
He's our senior architect.
It began with him simply bouncing ideas off me. I was a rubber duck basically. After a while I began to understand these ideas. All sorts of design patterns, cache invalidation problems and solutions, and so much more.
It was almost as if through osmosis that I began to research things and learn more and more about topics I had only barely seen in high-level articles and papers.
Once I began to contribute to the discussion, he helped foster that. I went from being a rubber duck to a protege.
My pay here isn't what it should be. The problems we're faced with are stressful and often times wear me out. I stay because I'm self-taught and I yearn for learning as I always have.
This isn't just my job, but my passion. I love what I do, and I get up happy to come here every day knowing I'll learn something new while doing what I love.1 -
I had two teachers in school, who even after finishing the class, continued to program with interested students. For example programming a robot or communicating over the serial port of a computer using Java.2
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So our HoD just sent us this image for doing some courses
And after seeing that superscript ++ I am not even gonna think about it
1 -
We won a competition - it was the first time he has taken part on it - and we had 1. place (me :p) and 2. place.
He was happy like a small kid, hung the certificate on the wall, made photos with our principal and the winners and we got in the newspaper xD4 -
Once again I have loads.
My best teachers were...
The contractor that taught me C#, ASP MVC and SQL Server. Dude was a legend, so calm and collected. He wanted to learn JQuery and Bootstrap so at the same time as teaching, he was learning from me. Such an inspirational person, to know your subordinates still have something to teach you. He also taught me a lot about working methodically and improving my pragmatism.
The other, in school I studied computing A-Level. 100% scored at least one of the exams... basically I knew my stuff.
But, as a kid, I didn’t know how to formulate my answers, or even string together coherent answers for the exams. This dude noticed, first thing he did was said “well you’re better at this bit than me, practice but you’ll be fine” (manually working out two’s complement binary of a number).
Second thing he did was say “you know what man, you know what you’re on about but nobody else is ever going to know that”.
He helped me on the subjects I wasn’t perfect on, then he helped me on formulating my answers correctly.
He also put up with my shit attendance, being a teenager with a motorcycle who thinks he knows it all, has its downsides.
As a result, I aced the hell out of that course, legendary grades and he got himself a bit of a bonus for it to use on his holiday. Everyone’s a winner.
Liam, Jason, if you guys are out there I owe you both thanks for making me the person I am today.
The worst, I’ve had too many to name... but it comes down to this:
- identify your students strengths and weaknesses, focus on the weaknesses
- identify your own and know when to ask for help yourself
- be patient, learning hurts.
You can always tell a passionate teacher from one who’s there for the paycheck.1 -
I started programming in the eighth grade, and the reason as to why I continued was my Computer teacher. She was a really strict person who was generally very irritated with our class, but one day I had decided to actually sit down and do the web page she had asked us to make in the lab.
The page was a very simple one, all you had to do was put a title and below it a paragraph and then a subheading as well that was moving around using the marquee tag.
Since no one generally bothered to do it because we were often left unsupervised in the lab, I was the only one who had finished it.
She came back and saw that I had completed it and no one else; in that moment, the teacher whom we had tagged 'Hitler' because of her rude and mean nature, told me that I had done a really good job and was happy with my effort.
That somehow that made me feel like making the best goddamn web page in every lab class thereafter.
Today I have mostly forgotten how to use HTML and CSS, but that whole idea of writing words and making your computer do shit was beautiful.
If I can say today that I know how to code, it is because of her.
One day I hope to tell her this in person and express my absolute gratitude.1 -
My hardware professor from first year at uni
He wasn't the best lecturer (which he openly admitted), but he was always willing to go an extra 10 miles to help you out, including essentially writing up the entire module into a nice document (70 pages long!) so we'd have good notes to revise from -
I want to say I would not have been the programmer I am now, if it hadn't been for all of my mentors in my past and current job who took a chance on me.
I am socially awkward, am nervous and stutter around new people, cannot sustain conversation, and as a consequence come out rather poorly in most kinds of interviews.
But there has been 3 mentors/leads in my life so far who saw through the nervous wreck I was in the few hours of the interview and took, what felt like to me, a gamble by hiring me. My current mentor even taught me everything I know on my job and has vastly shaped the programmer I am.
A humble thank you to all the amazing mentors out there, who inspire and enable the now green engineers, who will later be the mentors of the future generation!1 -
Weirdest moment ever in a CS class:
Course on probabilistic theory. Excercise mentions something about balls in 4 hats. Prof starts to draw them on a chalkboard in a shape of upside down male genitalia. Before finishing the second one starts to giggle.
Dude is a 70 yo grandpa. -
8 years ago,
I studied in a small school and every year we had computer classes, but most of the times, it gets cancelled or we just sit and browse and sometimes few of us don't even get a computer.
In that time, the only reason I was attached with the computer was due to games.
Our curriculum mentioned HTML, CSS, Access and Excel, which none of the teachers taught us for past 2 years. I wanted to learn all does, but gave up since no one cared about it.(please note that time, I didn't know even to use YouTube or W3schools to learn stuffs)
Then, a new student joined in our class and also a new computer ma'am joined our school. Both of them turned out to be really fun when it comes to learning computers.
She was active during last sessions and teach us HTML, CSS. I even started writing blogs which she taught. The most surprising part was she was super frank. She went beyond her duty, and taught me what Facebook is, how to use it, and opened an account for me which I am still using it, and she sent a friend request to herself. (In lab, past teachers would shout to students trying to open fb. All of them were super strict.)
She was kind and friendly, and during theory classes, the new student in our class would answer every single question. Then, somehow we both started sharing sits in computer class, and he will tell me answers and we both raise hands to answer the question. My teacher will also keep asking interesting questions which made me more inclined to computer science.
My story isn't related to learning a programming language or an algorithm, but it was the wave that brought me closer towards CS and after 2 years, I joined CS in University and till now, haven't look back and always thanked both of them, my respected ma'am and my dear friend, who inspired me and brought out my curiosity towards computers.
Note: My friend is doing Medical currently and when I teased him that I did CS and now, I know more than you and this time, I am gonna whisper in your ears if someone asks any question, to which he replied, I accept I am doing Medical, but I still love computers and know a hell lot about it.
My teacher got married and she also got a cute baby. We talk occasionally in fb and she is going great too.
I hope to meet both of them someday soon. -
Once again, I have to go with the guy that, after seeing my horrible (I can't highlight this enough) code, decided that even I wasn't hopeless, and went on teaching me the basics of software engineering, top-down design and unit testing. All of this in two days, but it gave me the motivation to work on it, and look at me now: I'm a devRanter :')
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I once failed a subject during my masters (complex analytics and measure theory).
Next year I decided to give it everything I've got. I had grown to love it and could solve most problems they threw at me. Hand written an 80 pages long "book" distilled from all the notes, proofs and visualisations from all the lectures that year.
I only exerted this effort (even though I could've just "passed" this subject) because the lecturer was so damn enthusiastic about maths. Even though he wasn't a CS teacher this course was my best experience of a teacher at uni. He loved the beauty of the maths he was teaching and managed to make me love it too.
He was a maths geek and when I aced my final he told me he actually writes code too. He showed me some simulations he wrote while he worked on some theoretical nuclear physics stuff, because that's what he was into. Really cool guy. I wish more CS lecturers were as good teachers.1 -
Gotta hand it to a faculty at my college. She is the best teacher, ever! Period.
She is pretty lenient, understanding, and always supports us and helps us.
She taught us Data Structures and the only thing that was bad was us students not giving as much effort as she gave to teach us.
She was so well that it always felt that we weren’t doing well enough.
Her subject was the only one in which every student passed!!
And still now, although she no longer teaches us, which hopefully changes next semester, I still love to go to talk to her about various things I do in programming and computers overall.
M just gonna say it...
U. R. The. Best.!!!! 😎☺️😊8 -
I learned the first things in php by the Sololearn app. If that count's as an teacher, it was quite a good one, cause it triggered my interest and guided me into this forest where only google and probably stackoverflow will lead out.2
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The internet! Seriously... 80% of my knowledge I have from the internet and learning by myself. Our dev teacher was awful...
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My best was my first - Dr Aston. Taught me Fortran.
The 1st ever essay I wrote on programming was littered with references to "and-sign". Prof calmly pointed out its called an "ampersand".1 -
We had a lab in middle school, 5th grade, I think, where they had a few Apple IIe computers.
I remember one day looking over at a smart friend's screen and he was playing a flight simulator. I'd never seen anything like it before. When I asked him how he did it, he showed me a computer magazine where all the code was published for it. He had typed the whole thing in and saved it to a floppy.
It was part of a turning point for me when I was deciding between social groups: wanting to be a dumb jock or wanting to be smart. Thanks to that kid's example, I chose being smart. It cost me dates with the hot girls later in high school when I should have been carrying a pager for all the teachers who needed me to fix their computers for them, but I made sure to cry all the way to the bank when I was eventually making six figures. -
in college ages ago, professor was "teaching" us overloading in C++, he goes something like this:
"so you can overload a function by changing the number of arguments, argument types, or method return type"
I dare put my hand up: "emm .. you can't overload by just changing the return type"
"you can"
"but, but.. how would the compiler know which overload I'm invoking when I call the method?"
pause..
"it depends on the type of the variable receiving the method call result"
"what if I call the method without assigning the result to a variable?"
agitated by now: "ah these are complex compiler concepts that are too complicated blah blah"
although I was unhappy, it was useful to realize no one knows everything5 -
When writing code that has to be evaluated by a college prof, redirect all the best practices to /dev/null2
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All my seniors in office approving my brand new created UI/UX
For a young professional like me, Happiness!! 😎😇 -
Our teacher who teaches us Linux doesn't even know how to run shell script. Every time we ran into the problem he is like you should solve by it yourself. Most of his lectures seems nonsense to me and looks like I'm wasting my time and money7
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Got an assignment last year to use a buffer overflow to "hack" a series of problems within some kind of assembly code. There were 2 required problems, but 6 in total. I completed all 7 (one hidden bonus problem).
The teacher that gave that assignment ended up writing me a letter of recommendation for my masters program -
Wow so many teachers... Looks like lots of people take CS. The only CS teacher I have is myself (and books).
Best Dev experience... So far... Writing Watcher.
First app I wrote using modular design and I use it still every day. -
I am in an apprenticeship as a software developer so you might think I would have lots of stories to tell in wk73 but you could not be more wrong! Our school teachers don't care about us or the thing they teach!
BUT in the first year, our company payed to send all of their IT trainees to a special training facility and the coaches there where amazing!!!👍🏼
For every IT related subject there was a coach! And they were fucking experts!
Let me tell you how this "training" worked:
1. Basic introduction to a certain subject
2. Some basic tasks
2.1 Extended tasks for those who want to dig into it
3. Search some other students to team up
4. Define project
5. Discuss the project plan with a coach.
6. Realize project
6.1 - Question rises -
6.2 Discuss question with coach
6.3 Coach prepares prepares presentation on the questions subject
6.4 Coach sends out invitation to everyone
6.5 LEARN AND PROFIT
7. Awesome product is finished
8. Present project to other students
The awesome part about this is that the coaches pushed us to our limits (so we would keep improving) but they would assist with every problem you faced.
They where relatively young and the spirit within the teams were amazing!
Because not all IT trainees have this kind of training the professional school is pretty boring ever since...
But I silently thank them for that training after every exam at school. -
Best professors I've ever had were the ones on free youtube tutorials and udemy classes. Often they seem to legitimately care more than actual professors.
Online instructors I've learned tons from:
Derek Banas
Bucky Roberts
The Net Ninja (don't know the name)
Maximillian Shwarzmüler
Colt Steele
Brad Traversy7 -
best teacher? i wont really consider it teaching but it had really helped me a lot in my 1st year of programming.
me: *sends an email* hey i dont really understand how to do this part
teacher: i dont really know how to explain it so i coded it myself *sends me code*
me: oh thanks! *copy paste to mine*
after a week:
I GOT A PERFECT SCORE!! but ofc now i dont trust the teacher's code anymore. i deal with my own code.1 -
201, an intro programming course using Python2. Prof was funny. She was a Redditor and slipped the casual troll face or derp face or other rage comic character in her lecture slides.
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My best experience is essentially being taught the creativity and adventure aspect of development.
My first second year programming lecturer (left early on for reasons) knew that our curriculum was stupidly easy and instead of focusing on it, he tried to give us a sense of wonder and exploration about the subject so that we can grow. It was well needed advice, seeing as my class fears programming because they never practice it.
IT sucked when he had to move on, but he managed to get the message across. I don't think I'd be as passionate about development this year if he wasn't around. It's not always just stringing instructions together for money. It's also exploring and creativity to find your way and build something awesome. -
Substitute teacher’s idea of a challenging class was two hours of file organisation complete with tutorial on how to make folders.
Of course I got detention because I asked for something else to do.
😑1 -
My father. It's thanks to him that I knew how to use a computer before I knew coherent speech. He's also the one who introduced me to linux long before my peers had even heard of it. Even now, he's the one I go to if I'm really lost for answers in anything related to computers. Like, when even StackOverflow fails me. 😱2
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My C# teacher. From all the beginning CS classes that I have taken she is the only that I really respect. She took the time to teach us how operators work, took the time to teach us Pseudo code, and made us code using just a pen and paper. I bought my laptop (instead of a desktop) to code along her in classes. She would ask us how to solve something. Gave us like 5 min to think about it, and then we would answer it, and she would translate our solution to code making comments for us to fully understand what was going on.2
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I had many good teachers and mentors in the years but one was far most the best. He was a CS Math teacher and hat this flame 🔥 for math and teaching. It was literally affecting everyone in class. He took his time to get everyone on the same level. While some would do better then others all would succeed. What made him special were many little tricks. He would let us all sit together after every topic and test and discuss what each found easy or hard. Everyone would get his time and he would never tolerate offending behavior. After a year we were all grown together helping each other get through the exams. It was kind of magical.
I told him this and he was in fact really happy to hear that. When we meet nowadays we get some drinks and talk about hobbies and stuff. -
Generally professors that shortly repeat things that the class didn't get or are very hard to understand..1
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One of my first classes about networks my teacher was talking about the differences between a Hub and a Switch, he just stop the class and say a random student's name from the list.
Teacher: "Martin Romero?"
Martin: "here"
Teacher: "this is how a Hub works, everyone listen the message but only Martin answer it."
It was the best example I ever heard from a teacher, one of the best in the whole university imo.1 -
Trying to convince the class that test-driven development + DTSTTMPW ("do the simplest thing that might possibly work") + pair programming is the way to go, our software dev prof had us split in groups of two that would each get a turn to
1. add a unit test
2. edit the code so it passes the test
3. commit the change
The goal was to write a java class that converts integers to roman numerals.
Each group had only 2 minutes before the prof made them revert their changes.
After 45 minutes the code was just 10 lines of this:
if ( n == 1 )
return "I";
else if ( n == 2 )
return "II";
else if ( n == 3 ) ... -
I have to follow a basic introduction to python for my study and the teacher is one the developers that worked on gtk
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Asked my teacher for help in 10th grade, she came up to my computer, looked at the code, zoomed in to 350%(ctrl+), mentioned that in C# we use upper cased functions names and then disappeared.
Not only the bug was not fixed, I couldn't even execute my code now.2 -
Teacher explained how genetic algorithm works by using us as a population. Best way to hear about GA for first time.2
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Best teacher? Well, I'm completely self taught so I'd have to nominate myself...
But seriously, check out Laracasts. Really helped me in the past with learning Laravel and recently with Vue.js.2 -
My Data Communication & Computer Networks (DCCN) teacher was the best teacher I've seen.
Teaching can be super hard. You're one against like sixty others who aren't interested in being there. To make that good learning environment, making the subject interesting etc, it not easy. Some justify that, "I can only bring the horse to the water" & proceed to just regurgitate whatever is on the book. Others cross question you & impose punishments - try to make you learn by fear.
But my DCCN teacher - she had the right balance between strictness & humour. So kids took her seriously (did homework, weren't late), yet never feared her - we felt comfortable asking doubts/questions.
She had some good tactics, like asking us to teach certian chapters - that made us learn better. She would revise them in the end also, incase we missed anything.
My best moment with her was when I scored the highest in my internals. She picked up my paper & showed the class - "see? Just two pages & he scored so much". There's was always those students who pump out a lot of stories/essays or whatever that comes to their mind about the topic in question. Lots of teachers just blindly give marks - "oh, s/he wrote this much, so it must be right".
But my DCCN teacher had zero tolerance for garbage. If you're wrong, you're wrong. Some even believe that the number of marks = number of lines you have to write!! Doesn't matter what you write. So, I was super glad when this teacher upped the standards. -
Well I would say a pretty humbling experience was my last job interview where my new boss and hr guy were truly shared by my skills and then the first day at work where my boss said please do this decision, I really need an opinion by an experienced developer like you as I am not sure which one is the better one.1
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My best CS teacher experience? Well, I've only taken one computer science college class(dual enrolled while in high school) but I think that I got the best possible teacher for that class. He wasn't a full time teacher, he was just part time from another company and was teaching Java.
It was great to have a teacher who was not a teacher by profession and actually knew the industry. Again, this was my only CS class, but I think that, from stories I've heard, I got lucky.1 -
I never studied CS. This was probably around 2004 (I was 10), I just got my first own computer. I used to mess around with HTML and JS previously, like making obnoxious marquees and so forth, but then I met this guy on DC++ who taught me the basics of VB. Before that I'd always thought of people who could make compiled exes as magicians, and I suddenly became one of them. It was a very empowering moment. While others were playing, I coded apps such as a geometry calculator for school, a TCP chat program (not as cool as Zuckerberg's), and so on.1
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My two best friends has been the most influential mentors I've ever had. One is a compiler engineer at a major computing company and the other one is a security engineer at a major company in Japan.
Both have sat down and taken the time to not only teach me different aspects of the computing environment, but empowered me to learn more on my own. One project I was working on ended up tapping into both of their teachings. I took a moment to think back on when they were teaching me and felt so grateful to have such patient teachers.
The moral here is that not everyone knows what you do. What makes a good teacher is someone who takes the time to teach and empower the individual. It really goes a long way. -
(a bit late for wk73 but I wanted to post this anyway)
Back in my first year of university, we had to write a relatively simple (though it looked super complicated back then) C++ console application. I don't know what it's called, but it's that game where the computer generates a random 4 digit code and you have to try to guess what it is. Every time you try, it will tell you which digits are correct, which would be correct if they were in a different position and which are outright wrong.
Anyway, the program had a main menu with a help option that would output a short guide on how to play the game. Instead of hard coding it into the source code, the "guide" had go be written in a separate text file and then read and dumped to the screen when necessary.
Here came my great idea on how to read files. Instead of looping through the file until I reached the end, I counted the number of lines my text file had and wrote some gem of a piece of code like this:
for (int i = 0; i<11; i++){
line = file.readline();
cout << line << endl;
}
My teacher obviously took points off for doing such a stupid thing, and I remember complaining A LOT about it. I argued that 11 was a constant because I didn't plan on changing the text file, and that the teacher had no right to take points off for only reading 11 lines because the file only had 11 lines, so it was read in full.
Goddammit, what an innocent little brat I was. I'm glad my first programming teachers were good enough to stay firm and teach me how to do things the right way, even if it's the hard way. -
Me teaching to myself because the school I've been to so far either hired bad teachers ("You know how to add ints together ? Alright let's make a rally game in C++"), dudes that were only here for the money or dudes that didn't have time to go in details so it was exclusively theory1
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There was this prof who loved Ada, it did not bother him that it was not modern. His lecture was mainly based on Ada and where he could he pointed out that it is the best language. He hated JavaScript which I can relate to. None the less it was still interesting and I learned a lot.1
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Not my CS lecturer but my ICT teacher in high school convinced me that it would be a great idea to go study CS at University. It was the best decision of my life as I'm now happily working full time as an Android developer for a startup. Couldn't imagine myself doing any other well paid job and being this happy.
Sadly I never got to tell him where I ended up post graduation but I did get to tell him that I secured myself a good placement year when I was at university when I found out he was sick.
He was so grateful of me getting in touch and I'm glad I managed to get to say thank you to him before he passed away.
Leukemia fucking sucks. RIP. -
This teacher had a stack of paper that had the lesson and made us basically copy it down, when you were done move to the next lesson. If you showed him there was a mistake on the lesson he would check and if it was a mistake he would give you an extra mark. He allowed us to learn at our pace (except for when there was tests) and make mistakes and discuss how to improve something with those right beside us.
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My first real programming teacher. She showed us strings, then made us use dynamic arrays in C++ for a year and a half. But we learned pointers and arrays very well!
The hard way can be the best way for education. -
My best CS Teaching experience is when I'm working with someone in C++, and I get to see the look on their faces when it finally starts to make sense.
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Had a Java teacher in my local TAFE start his lessons going further and further in history till he got to tape drives... Put students to sleep, literally...2
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My teacher at UTSA; Dr. Maynard, was the best teacher I have ever had. His tests were tough but fair, he actually took the time to teach instead of reading from a slide deck, and there was no question he didn’t have an answer for.
People once got mad and wrote on a board in the CS lab “if you think Maynard’s exams are too hard, write your name here”. I changed the prompt to say “if you should change your major to business, write your name here”. He thought it was hilarious. -
At university: Error 404
But as I say: you can learn from everything, from good how to do the things, from bad how to not do the things.
One example: don't copy code directly from a PowerPoint presentation, it will change the " to other symbol and make you look like a fool when the compiler throws errors and you don't figure it out why -
Well, not best experience per se, but most memorable one.
So I am accepted to CS program at the university - happy days!
First lecture of the first day of the first semester in the first year...
...It just had to be that guy. He was famous for for his strictness among the faculty as we later found out.
But, the lecture. It's 8.25 am, I am making my way into auditorium, and it's filled with freshmen like me, of course. Instead of cheerful chatter noise I hear literally silence. What the? I catch the glimpse of the blackboard - the professor is there, hard at work writing out some stuff that can't comprehend. Double checked the name of the lecture - computer architecture.
8.30 - so it begins, I remember taking a place along the front rows in order to see more clearly. Professor turns to us and just starts the lecture, saying that he'll introduce himself later at the end and there is no time to waste. OK...
And he just dumps the layout of x86 computer architecture and a mixture of basic ASM jargon on us WITHOUT TURNING TO US FOR LIKE 30 MINS while writing things out on the blackboard.
The he finally turns 180 degrees very quickly, evaluates our expression (I know mine was WTF is this I don't even understand half the words), sighs, turns back and continues with the lecture. -
So happy, a former colleague, now friend, of mine decided to join my project, he has a lot of experience and helped me out a ton in my first professional years to gain knowledge about optimization, performance, architecture and countless more stuff.(--> wk73 best dev teacher I had)
The only downside, in this case very minor downside, is that I now have to go back to something I despise: project management... I need to properly format and transfer all my scribblings and thoughts into a roadmap and a rough specification, so he has a good start into the project.
Overall though I am really looking forward to this collab, since I love to work in a team, especially with such great support. -
Best dev experience...a colleague who was my team lead when I joined a company as a "from-scratch" PHP developer, and gave me a ton of tips, assistance, encouragement and praise along the way. And for the bits that were not so good (on my part), he gave me constructive criticism delivered in a friendly and helpful way rather than chew me out.
And when the boss(es) of the company talked shit behind my back in meetings I was not invited to, about things they had no clue about (my performance as a developer)) he defended me and set the record straight.
Later he was demoted from team lead for office politics reasons. But was doing the same job as before, for less pay. Never complained.
His job consisted of, all at once, being the company IT/server/printer guy, first line customer support over phone and remote desktop, .NET and PHP developer, course holder to teach our customers how to use our product, and mentor to me.
Good guy. I'd give him a ++ if I could. -
He was not reslly my dev-teacher, he was a math/physics teacher. But he had an after school an it workshop. That was the first place where i really worked with development. I was just a bit with html, php and LEGO mindstorms but it helped me with my knowledge. He is one of the best teachers in my school. Without him I would probably making windows and doors.
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So there is this one teacher/dev where I just had a lecture. And I easily can say he is one of the best programming teachers I had so far. Not that what he says is a hundred percent correct (heavily influenced by his opinion, ex. Singleton being a good pattern), but he motivates you to think about what you do and the lecture. He saw that no one was following and said that no one could probably remember the start of the lecture and he was damn right.
He's just so open about it and said that it doesn't matter and you have to go home and practice. At the start he said that we all are programmers and not software developers. Explaining the difference and showing funny pictures. A fucking spoon build out of a fork and a plastic cup. But not reusable at all and might break when overheated by the soup. Genius explanation of the difference. On the other side was a spoon which could be hung up on the edge of the bowl without overhearing the end so you don't burn your hand. That is software developing.
Now the point is that I got a bit mad when he said no one here could develop software and when he asked if someone can explain what a pattern is it was my time to shine. Boom, on point explanation and a complement from him following in the question where I got the knowledge from and why I could explain specific patterns. The answer was a simple 'I learn about software developing and engineering in my free time' and then he just said that I'm a nerd. I was so proud and ashamed at the same time.
Long story short: be proud of us. Geeks and nerds are nice persons and I might just have earned some respect among my friends.
I just realized this is a rather long and unstructured rant but I really felt like sharing that little achievement of being recognized. -
Well, Uhm I have this instructor in Web Programming that throughout the whole semester, what he only thought was html and css. We never tackled PHP nor Javascript, SMH.
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Not really sure about a good dev teacher experience... most of them either bullshitted or had a beef with me... learnt most of the stuff on my own i guess
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"String reverse with recursion" - I know it's a small thing for seasoned coders but back when I was starting It opened tons of possibilities.
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Sorry, what's best experience when she supervised our html/css/js project and exam with internet explorer (IE)
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Really appreciated the first professor of front end developement. He was very helpful and his teaching always very detailed. Always looked forward to his class. Heard he is working for the army intelligence now. Definitely gonna buy him a beer if I see him again, I owe him that much.
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going from IT Operations to System Developer.... good progression as one knows alot about the hardware that you are compiling on.
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from the students point of view: my it-security module last semester which had nothing new for me because i was thrown into an internship with no work prepared and had to teach myself for the whole semester in it-security which has shown me that said path was the right one for me :)
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