I know it’s been a long time since I last posted, but I think it is relevant to discuss training and education, especially in software development. This has been a topic weighing on my mind a lot the past several years.

In the past 20 years since I made the leap into my career path, I have witnessed many changes in technology. The microprocessor and the internet have taken over nearly every facet of our daily lives. It is quite remarkable where we came from to where we are today, and to think it has only been that short of a time while I’ve been a professional.

When I first started writing software, we didn’t have the rich toolsets we have now. We had some very basic compiler suites, or command line compilation using a text editor to edit the source files. We also didn’t have the libraries available today. Most problems we had to solve from scratch. Finally, to top it off, we didn’t have Google to save the day when we needed that snippet of code to hybridize into our own solution. We had to know how to write algorithms to solve problems. The solutions weren’t handed to us, and we weren’t coddled to the answer via great tools that auto complete our lines of code, and format our code and give us instant feedback to errors or omissions without compilation and trial and error.

I may sound like an codgidy old man, and maybe I am, but I think having to solve problems from scratch taught my generation a lot about problem solving. I think this is the magic bullet that is missing from the college curriculum, work training programs, or coding bootcamps. I think all of those things are great, and there is some foundational stuff there, but these folks are missing out on algorithm design. This is the foundation for which all software works. You have to be able to solve problems. You can’t just rely on Google or great tools to solve them for you.

So, here I plead to anyone affiliated with these software development educational programs, spend some time on bubble sort or binary search. Teach your students about how to extract a subset of text from a string, or how to increment numbers exponentially. Spend some time on conditional logic, and order of operation. All of these things have value, and while pretty basic, they are the building blocks that we are skipping over to get to the cool IDE or the latest tool or JavaScript library.