[shawnee_]

It's hard for me to agree with much of anything the author states here. This snippet is why:

> I don’t teach network programming and haven’t tested these specific ideas. But, in my specialty of software design and code quality, I use exercises built on similar principles all the time.

In the real world, learners do not come packaged with all the tools and links and resources they need to hammer out their solutions. Classrooms are great when you can have a textbook and pre-defined problems and such, but that is not now it works outside of the classroom (or the virtual classroom, as the case may be).

"Software design" is not an isolated component from network programming. It is that bridge between big data always getting piped in to (app / product / website) from the network, and how to help ( user / customer / other developer) where most engineers are hired to create value.

It is a good idea to attempt to design software with "code quality"; conceptually that sounds like a fantastic idea. But it is impossible to do without also factoring in a predictive element of how it will be used or accessed or even discovered over networks, stores, whatever.