NYCPHP Meetup

[charlie derr]

Kenneth Downs wrote:
> Christopher R. Merlo wrote:
>> Hello friends.  My apologies for the cross-posting, but I'm sending 
>> the same request to all groups.
>>
>> We are developing two new web programming courses at NCC, and we need 
>> some statements from people in management and leadership positions in 
>> IT to support the need for these courses, which will teach HTML, 
>> JavaScript, CSS, PHP, JSP, and RDBMS interaction with MySQL.  If you 
>> feel you can help, please e-mail me, and I'll send you the proposed 
>> course outlines.
> 
> Something that I notice is often missing in whole or in part is an 
> appreciation of architecture-level concerns.  In other words, people are 
> often taught how to code, but not *what* to code or *where*.  The 
> critical issues of where to place code between the tiers, and how to 
> make such judgements, are often lacking. 
> 
> Another factor that often seems to be missing, strange as it seems, is 
> the simple idea that all programs serve human goals.  In other words, 
> some person somewhere is committing time and money to a system, and 
> almost always it is for the purpose of gain.  While a good programmer 
> will take pride in the quality of his craftsmanship, it often seems to 
> be missing to take pride in serving the needs of the non-programmer who 
> is depending on you.  While this may seem a "soft" issue compared to the 
> nuts-and-bolts of PHP or SQL, it separates a useful employee from a 
> useless one.
> 
> With those two ideas in mind, a personal beef of mine is the lack of 
> understanding of what a database is and what it can do, so I'm always in 
> favor of more emphasis in that area.
> 
> Finally, and this may seem strangest of all, the three most productive 
> employees I've ever had knew nothing of our particular technology when I 
> hired them.  In each case I hired and attitude and an aptitude and then 
> showed them the language we were using and put them to work.  None of 
> them was uneducated, I'm not suggesting no education was needed, but all 
> of them were well grounded in general principles.  It seems the course 
> outline suggested above would be a wonderful cornerstone for teaching a 
> lot of very basic CS concepts, which might then produce some 
> general-thinking employment candidates.
> 
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>> -c
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------


I concur completely.  One thing that would have made it obvious that the things you speak of had been considered is if UML had 
been listed prominently (alongside the programming languages & html).

	~c