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by xf1cf
1813 days ago
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What ever happened to exploring computing through just building small, cool, things? Maybe I'm old now, but this trope has been parroted here and elsewhere as a panacea. Need a job? Contribute to open source for the CV experience. Need something to do? Contribute to open source. I could see this as maybe something for a small software engineering course to do. maybe. I think in those cases it might even be better to split the class into teams and have them develop a product idea, elect people to various roles, and execute the plan as a semester long project. Midterms, quizzes, etc become sprint reviews and plannings. It would be great if you could get some of the b-school kids to roll over for a combined class where they takeover PMing. Admittedly I am cynical. But the way I got into programming was many, many years before I started my CS degree. I just built cool things I needed. I got into reverse engineering because being a lazy high schooler I wanted to build trainers for video games so I could get a high level without actually working on it. Call it pathetic - sure. But playing video games is so boring. It's much more fun to get them to play for you :). What ever happened to just being interested? I hesitate to suggest this but could it because a lot of people are getting into computer science strictly for the job? So that they reach the terminal points in the program and are completely without direction? I dunno, just rambling I guess. This just strikes me as so odd. |
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It totally exists, but back in our day you built the one computer you had and that was that. Now everyone has lots of computers. So maybe you don't make your own laptop but you can absolutely make a "computer" and hack all kinds of fun things.
See: Arduino, Raspberry PI, STM32 et al., Teensy, BeagleBone, TinyFPGA, etc. etc. etc.
Honestly, I am kinda jealous. You can buy more random electronics than I could've dreamed of as a kid with paper route money (do kids even still do that?). Test equipment too.