Learn Your Tools Before Anything Else

2021-03-01

Yeah I know it's an obvious title. But given my experience with my school's CS program, it's something that a lot of people would do well to figure out.

I was thinking today about one of the first CS professors I ever had a few years ago. Technically he wasn't even a professor. He was just a graduate student put in charge of an experimental version of the course I was taking. The reason I still remember him even though I can't remember any of my other professors or material from that semester is that he took time out of class to teach us not only programming, but his *workflow* for programming. Pretty much every other professor at that course level was just sending students a download link for Visual Studio and letting them figure the rest out on their own. My professor introduced the class to CLIs, gcc, make, gdb, and still had time to cover the couse curriculum.

Sure it was more to learn, but learning those tools and that workflow has helped me and made me more productive in every course I've taken since. I'm actually even a little frustrated that I didn't learn this stuff right away. I realize I struggled more than I probably had to in the courses I had taken before. They had taught me programming, but this one was teaching me how to do programming.

Later on I decided to go after the software engineering emphasis offered by the CS program. This emphasis mostly just shuffled a few required courses and electives around, but one additional requirement was that I take a few labs (mostly self-guided, one credit hour courses) designed specifically for the emphasis. It turns out that these labs have been another high point, again because they focused on the learning of all kinds of different tools and the times you would want to use them.

Anyway, I feel like my courses now are much easier than they otherwise would be because I've got that good foundation of knowing different tools to use, how they work, and how to use them together. I can just focus on the course material without getting wrapped up in a bunch of other details. I know several other people earlier on in the program and it doesn't sound like my experience is standard, which is disappointing since I feel it turns a lot of people away from tech-y fields that they might've ended up really enjoying.

So I guess the lesson today is if you're struggling to grasp something, maybe take a little bit to make sure you fully understand the tools you're using. Try to discover new workflows from other people and you might find a new way of doing things that really clicks for you.

- moddedBear

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This toot from @cirno@fosstodon.org which is what got me thinking of all this in the first place.