[blt]

I wish I could have a mentor like Juergen in the article. Ever since I started writing code, nobody has had enough time or dedication to go over my work line-by-line like that. I learn those lessons by trial and error when my code breaks. And they aren't lessons I could have learned in college. I've got a long way to go, but one day if I'm actually a good programmer I'll try hard to be a mentor like that to the new guys.

[ams6110]

This is a good point. A university CS education will not be about writing good code in any particular language (at least mine wasn't). If you are not at an engineering school there will not be a lot of emphasis on software engineering practices. And you can't really lean on your peers very much because they are as inexperienced as you are. Even your TAs and professors likely don't have any experience writing production quality, maintainable code in a commercial/business setting: they are more likely to write "proof of concept" code for their particular research interests.

In short, a traditional Computer Science curriculum is not designed or intended to churn out e.g. Rails developers who can be immediately productive. An apprentice-style training system could do that, however at the expense of not teaching some of the more theoretical computer science (or teaching it in a much more applied style).

[icelancer]

> Ever since I started writing code, nobody has had enough time or dedication to go over my work line-by-line like that.

Commit big changes to open source projects. I bet you get a wide variety of reactions.