Projects the Hard Way – Coding Projects for Early Coders
This is a great progression in the series by Zed...if you lurk r/learnprogramming, or any other place full of aspiring coders, a common complaint/desire is that students will have passed all the Khan/Codecademy courses, but have no idea what to do with the pieces of programming fundamentals that they've acquired. This is not just a problem with self-learners...I've seen a few r/learnprogramming posts by CS grads from 4-year-colleges who say they have literally no idea what an API is or why/how to work with one.<p>And I don't think it's necessarily correlated to the rigor/prestige of the program. I had a discussion with Stanford professor who is building a course that involves hands-on work with real-world data problems...he undertook this initiative after finding that some PhD students, while brilliant in their research and coursework, did not know where to begin with relatively easy data cleaning work. I don't know exactly what the disconnect was, but I'm guessing it wasn't because data cleaning is particularly difficult as a CS problem. But it does require the ability to "see the big picture"...not just how different code modules and components can be designed to talk to each other, but the context and general who-gives-a-shit in regards to a given data/computational problem.<p>So yeah, thinking about small projects to code for is a great way to make things "click". Can't wait to see what examples Zed comes up with.