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Does anyone have any suggestions on how to mentor a junior programmer ? If you have mentored someone did you follow any process or was it quite informal ?
If you've been mentored in the past what kind of things did you find most helpful ?
Try to set aside between 30-60 minutes a day to review their code together. If you can't do this, then try to get together to review their code whenever they make a code commit, unless it was very basic. Have them explain why they chose the approach they took in lieu of others. A process like this helps to establish a great relationship, as well as really stimulate the student to think on their own and be able to defend their decisions. Not only does the student end up with someone approachable whom they can trust, but you'll notice an improvement in their quality of code and logic almost immediately.
Edit: Also, If you are unable to commit this much time to co-review with your junior, then you probably shouldn't be mentoring them and instead see if anyone else has a schedule that would allow it. The whole point of mentoring is to actively aid in the professional development of the student, and they're not going to learn much if proper attention and guidance is not given to them.
I had the chance to work as an intern (one of two) in a small software company and had the opportunity to work on an "almost new" project they had. They had me set up with everything needed and gave me an introduction into what the project actually was (basic stuff like what the requirements were etc).
At first we got to do minor tasks like researching things that mattered to the project (they had given us a list of topics). This was, I think, to see how much we could handle ourselves, as the things we needed to look up and research were not that trivial and it took a good 2 weeks or so (counting the basic demos we had to create for it). That testing phase was actually done really without much 'coaching'.
However, after that period we could work on the actual project itself. This was also the moment we began to be coached together, in a similar style to pair programming, except there were three of us (2 interns and 1 'coach').
We learned a lot from him, but it was in an informal manner, and he didn't act like the 'all-knowing-listen-to-me' guy. When we had suggestions he would listen and think through with us whether they were any good. or give his view on why an idea should not be done in that way... Now that I think of it, he actively encouraged us to make suggestions, and to think about better ways to do things, instead of just sitting there 'taking orders' from someone who probably knows what to do better then you.
So in short:
Let the junior programmer work (mostly) on his own to study the materials at hand, give him a list of minor TODO things like looking up information, or building small demos.
Check the work he has done regularly and advise him if there are better ways to do things. Also point out the items he actually did well, that way he'll remember those for later.
Let him work on a real project, and mentor him by working together at the same project, giving him advice when he has questions.
The effort has to come from both directions: encourage him to ask questions, to challenge 'the way it is currently done'. Ask him questions on how he thinks it should be done and give him your opinion as well.
Make it 'enjoyable' - don't let it look like you are giving orders.
During an internship w/ a large company that had a lot of in house IT, I was paired w/ a mentor. The practice definitely aided my career development, both in terms of technical skills and business skills. Here are some of the reasons the mentoring worked out so well:
Credible: The mentor had 8+ years of experience and an accomplished background to draw upon in leading and training. He'd been through different challenges, worked in different environments, so he had a great perspective.
Genuine: The mentorship was encouraged by the supervisor, but not so formal as to make it an exercise in going through the motions. The mentor wanted to mentor, and I wanted someone to learn from.
Passion: The mentor loved the field he was in, the problems he was solving, and the technologies he was using. When I came under his wing, I found this to be infectious.
Sharp and Articulate: The mentor approached issues critically and framed them concisely. There wasn't a lot of fuzziness in our discussions; we got to the root of the matter and he directed me on wise courses of problem solving and action.
Meaningful: The work I was doing w/ the mentor was meaningful work, not just an exercise to keep busy or ramp up in a skill set. By jointly working on a task that tangibly aided the organization, that helped focus my interest and legitimize the mentoring process.
At my first place of employment there was this really patient dude that would always help me solve my immediate problem, and then teach me some important underlying principle. I loved this because he would help me stay productive while teaching me how to become a better programmer.
I'd be the junior, I guess :) I think I'd value an informal approach. It probably depends a lot on your and your mentee's characters, but I'd say that you learn best if you don't have egos in the way. Break the ice, make sure there's feedback in both directions. Things like code reviewing (both ways?) and occasional pair programming may work, and if there's a good match, it may be a lot of fun, as well!
Because I had to explain why I wanted to co-op (besides needing the money) during my interview, my manager made sure my first project allowed me to work on what I had identified as weak areas: very little Linux experience (I chose a Linux-only R&D team so I would be forced to learn), not knowing a useful text editor (I really wanted to learn Vim), and how to learn another programming language (very different approach than learning a language as you learn to program). He told me I was being paid to study for a while.
I learn best by reading books, so after chuckling over Unix for Dummies (yay! I wasn't the only one who thought this was obscure and knuckleheaded sometimes) I started with Unix in a Nutshell and Sobell's Practical Guide to Linux Commands. After that I printed out the Vim documentation and started going through it. Then I looked through a couple books on Python, the language of my first project. I was given all the time I needed to feel comfortable about these things (which was the real problem, as I now understand) and then began adding functionality to a previous co-op's project.
I realize now it would have been terrific to meet with someone every day or two for code review, as Kamikaze Mercenary said.
In my experience, when mentoring someone, it is very important for the mentee to really WANT to learn more.
Never ever spoon feed them. Instead point them towards things of value and have them utilize the new information they are learning in projects that they are using. Knowledge is useless if not put into practice. So encourage your mentee to code, code, code.
Here would be my short list:
Pair programming - This is helpful for many things, like reinforcing various ideas and practices. Getting used to Resharper is much easier when you pair with someone that uses it often.
Informal chats - This is where we would go get a drink, go outside for someone to have a smoke break, go for lunch together, etc. While away from the desks, the discussion may be related to work immediately being done or it may be abstract philosophical stuff that can help bring someone's game up a notch or two. Talking about various upcoming technologies or changes in what coming can be exciting and help form bonds as well.
Feedback and suggestions - This is what occured in both above cases. Books like "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie can help in understanding various human relationship dynamics, which while that sounds quite technical is really just about how to motivate someone else in various ways. A key point here is to know how to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to pick up some practices, like giving hint after hint about something rather than just give the answer. I have had various Math teachers that had a gift for this for how I developed some of this skill.
So part of this is merely motivating the other person and trying to guide them as when someone figures something out for themself it can be an empowering and enlightening experience. The, "I did it! That's right, moi, yours truly!" kind of self-talk is quite nice when it happens.
Ask them what would they try next to complete the task. This can give an idea of where from the "I don't know what to do" to "Well, I would try this but..." category are they in terms of having their own idea that may be useful for a starting point.
Take a quick look at what they want to do and offer hints so that they figure out the problem. This is rather than give the answer of, "Just take out this line of code," suggest they look at what is there and is it all necessary
I would recommend start giving parts of real assignments you have and make everything to be able to use his code. In other words train him as replacement for yourself.
This way you will commit yourself to allocating time to work with junior and he will be able to see "real life". By working on real assignments and hearing lively feedback he will be able to get p to speed rather quickly.
Drawback of this approach is that it is possible that it will have too narrow focus on you particular project. So be sure to show the trainee possible alternatives and encourage trade-offs analysis to widen his professional horizon.
Couple of years ago I worked for a small company, where on the first day I was given a list of small task to complete - do some little changes in code, find and fix a small bug in the project. It really helped me to ask the right questions from my mentor and familiarize myself with the environment, the code base. These tasks were easy to complete, so I had a little bit of self confidence, before turning to the bigger tasks.
This way of mentoring really worked with me very well, so I am planning to do the same with our new colleague.
I have mentored several junior people under me before. My approach varied slightly based on the person a bit based on how they learned.
In short, I gave the junior people small, self-contained projects when I could and gave them a relatively fixed time to complete the task. Once the task was complete I would review their approach, code and solution and made suggestions for improvements or a better way to handle the problem. I think this way they don't feel overwhelmed being part of a much larger project.
Hope this helps a bit.
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I'm a computer science student finishing up my second semester of programming classes. I've enjoyed them quite a bit, and learned a lot, but it seems other students are struggling with the concepts and assignments more than I am. When an assignment is due, the inevitable group email comes out the day or two before with people needing some help either with a specific part of the problem, or sometimes people just seem to have a hard time knowing where to start.
I'd really like to be able to help out, but I have a hard time thinking of the right way to give them help without giving them the answer. When I'm having trouble understanding a concept, a code snippet can go along way to helping me, but at the same time if it makes a lot of sense, it can be difficult to think of another way to go about it. Plus the Academic Integrity section of each assignment is always looming overhead warning against sharing code with others. I've tried using pseudo code to help give others an idea on program flow, leaving them to figure out how to implement certain aspects of it, but I didn't get too much feedback and don't know how much it actually helped them out, or if it just confused them further.
So I'm basically looking to see if anyone has experience with this, or good ways that I can help out other students to nudge them in the right direction or help them think about the problem in the right way.
Have them explain their code to you.
This accomplishes several things:
First, it demonstrates that they actually have code to show you. How can they not understand something if they haven't even opened up a text editor yet?
Next, it demonstrates that they understand the code at a basic level. They could have copied it from somewhere. If they don't know the first thing about the code they have, that's a flag. (If they did copy the code, but still took the time to understand the code, then that's still academically dishonest but it's a valuable skill to use after college.)
Finally, now we're at the place where they might actually get it, with your help (or possibly even without!) If they get to the place where the hole in their understanding is (as they're explaining their code to you) and it jumps out at them, then they've solved their own problem. If they don't recognize the hole, then this is where you can give them targeted hints.
I've worked as a TA and at a CS department help desk (and helped buddies). This is what I do...
Abstract out the issue, find a related problem, then work through the related problem with them. If they can't make the connection, you can't really help them.
Edit: and refuse to help with more than the bare basic syntax if they are looking for help the day of or day before. Things should have been dealt with long before deadline. Crutching people on the day-of is not a good practice for you.
Some thoughts:
Do pair programming
Have the student (the person you are helping) sit in the chair and code something. Could be a code snippet, could be a portion of a project, anything, as long as it represents something they have trouble on. As they go, point out (not rudely) places where they may have done something incorrectly, or something that could be improved upon.
Review work done
One of the things that helped me the most was to have a peer (as opposed to a teacher or student aide) review my code. Most of the time the peer could point out places where they might have done something differently.
Make them repeat you.
I often make people I'm helping learn repeat what I just said to see if they understand it or have any questions. You would be surprised how often people don't speak up when they don't understand something.
Offer help before the project is due.
Trying to get the project done the night before it is due is a surefire way to, at the very least, not learn the concepts as thoroughly as you might have otherwise.
Don't code it yourself
Your peers will learn nothing if you do it for them.
Find other resources
An aide, a friendly professor, another one of your peers can be invaluable resources. If you find that your style of teaching doesn't mesh well with one of your peers' style of learning, point them toward someone else who might be able to help them more.
Hope for the best
You can only go so far when teaching someone; they have to want to learn.
One thing that might be helpful to your fellow students is to point to similar code in the lecture notes (or if you don't get lecture notes handed out, in your own notes). That way you're only showing them what the professor said, but doing it in a helpful way.
If another student is open to it, asking them questions about everything they've tried and why would be helpful.
Finally, consider going to your professor and asking for his or her input on what you are allowed to do and how they might suggest you help others. After all, professors have years of experience in teaching students. Even more, will you have an opportunity as an undergraduate to be a TA in future years? I got to TA as an undergraduate, and that helped me to productively use my impulses to assist others without breaking any honor codes. If you have such undergraduate employment opportunities, letting professors see you now as the helpful type will help you acquire them.
I don't think you should be helping them. I think it's academically dishonest. Also, it does them no help to have you give them answers, or even to have you be around to answer questions, since once they get to the exam (or the real world), you won't be there for them. They need to not only learn how to program on their own (which presumably you're helping them do), but also get their questions answered on their own. That means posting on places like StackOverflow. You might want to recommend that they formulate a specific question (always a good exercise) and post it on here with the "homework" tag.
When I was taking CS classes in college, there were a number of students who just couldn't code or design at all (and I'm thinking of a senior level software engineering class in particular). They also had no idea how to go about solving problems, or where to look things up, where to get questions answered, or what questions to ask. They were totally helpless because they had spent most of their undergraduate time working on their homework/projects in groups and having the more talented group members hand-hold them. Don't perpetuate this. The last thing the industry needs is more incompetent programmers who graduate with good grades to put on their resume.
Whenever I tried to teach my girlfriend how to program I did almost nothing but ask questions. (she got to the .each statement before getting bored)
Ask them question how their code works and how they think they could accomplish the task. Give them small nudges in the right direction. And never EVER type something for them. If you have another computer and type code on it to show them and show them the results, that is fine but don't over do that.
Here's the advice I give my student teachers: avoid giving answers to students. Instead, ask them questions. And make sure to ask questions that they can ask themselves in the future. For the material I teach, here are some of the questions I want all students asking themselves:
What is your abstraction?
What is an example of how your abstraction is supposed to behave? Can you show me another example?
Are there any examples of where you abstraction is allowed to fail? How should it fail on that example?
Have you tested these examples?
What is the representation of your abstraction?
How does the representation relate to the abstraction? Can you show me a picture? Can you show me in math?
What functions are allowed to see the representation? What is the contract of each function? Does the representation satisfy an invariant that the function can assume? Does each function make sure the invariant is preserved?
What does valgrind say?
One of the most common problems in teaching is determining whether the student understood you. An easy and effective way to determine if you should continue or rephrase is to have the student demonstrate their understanding by doing something closely related but not identical.
Also, since programming is essentially word problems, it's important that the student break things down into steps. I'd be asking to see their highlevel step-through before I showed them anything. Too many people get hung up in syntax and never really nail down what they're trying to do before diving in.
A general experience in explaining stuff to others is to find out where they stand first. Try to refrain from giving them solutions to problems they don't even have yet (even if you are sure that they will come across them later). In other words, don't go two steps ahead of them. If they have problems understanding call-by-value, don't explain them recursion.
As far as helping fellow students in general, I generally use the "play stupid" approach. I pretend that I know nothing about their particular assignment, and I ask them to get me up to speed on what they are supposed to be doing. I also ask them to give me a quick run-down of what they learned in class about whatever concept the assignment is about. This usually takes about 5 minutes and about 95% of the time, the other student has answered their own question by the time they finish explaining it to me. If they haven't solved it by this point, I ask them to walk me through their solution to the assignment. In doing this, they usually catch where their solution deviates from what they just said they learned in class.
As far as programming-specific help goes, I sometimes ask the other student to send me their code and I run it through a simple shell script I wrote. That script blanks out everything in the code file that is not a comment, and I give the result to the other student to read. The resulting file usually reads like an outline of their code, and a lot of times they can see where their code went wrong simply by getting the code out of the way. If their approach is completely wrong, I tell them to write an outline of what the code is supposed to do (in high-level terms) using comments; after completing this, they fill in each section of the outline with code that implements that outline step (testing each "chunk" as they go). This helps a lot of people separate the code from the algorithm (many common problems I see stem from the lack of a systematic or disciplined approach to problem solving, and this exercise helps get them on the right path).
Another method is to answer questions using a different programming language. For example, I helped several of my fellow students on Matlab projects by explaining the concepts using C, Ruby, or even pseudo-code (that read more like plain English than code). I knew that they had far more experience with other languages, so I used what they knew best to illustrate the concepts and encouraged them to try solving the problem in their "native language" first. Once they were confident that they understood the concepts, they could work on figuring out how to implement them in the target language. Having to learn new concepts while you are still learning a language makes both more difficult. This approach also helps determine whether they are having trouble understanding how to solve the problem or how to code the solution.
PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH
show them some popular real world APPLICATIONS (as an example) which they use day to day...written in same programming language you are trying to teach.....
explain every thing with background
give every student, considerable importance
alwaysss use colour coded syntax
We are hiring a UX consultant, had a broadstrokes session with the company, liked their work, think the candidates are ok and now want a more concentrated interview with the specific UX consultant that will be embedded into the scrum team.
What questions should be asking that could weed out any dead weight candidates.
Thanks.
Ask Tog has a good Quiz. I'd also ask stuff on the Gestalt principles, but that's probably because I have a masters degree in HCI (as in that might be a bit academic). That said Gestalt principles are very important especially for things like Form design.
I guess also you could ask them what their favourite book on UX design are, if they can't list any that would be very odd to me.
Personal Experience A good UX practitioner should be taking an interest in the things they use personally. I would ask them what they use personally - obvious technology items like phone and websites, and also less obvious things like kitchen appliances and vending machines. If a UX candidate can't tell me what they observed in their day so far (e.g. the car or public transport they used to get to the interview), that's a good way to weed out the dead weight right there.
Practical Problems As with programming, the best way to assess someone is give them a real-world problem you're facing (or faced) and see how they deal with it. Their thought processes are more important than the answer.
I am a UI Designer/Developer and once I gave an interview to Verizon for UX Designer position. By the way, it was a phone interview. I never worked as UX Designer before. The person who interviewed me asked me about my past work experiences, skill sets and asked me if have contributed as UX designer before. With regards to technical question, he actually sent me a document which had some brief information (part of an application) and then a small interface (it was like a table with some graphic based information, and based on this information, the call center people would respond to user request). I was asked to study this table carefully and then i was given 24 hour timefame to suggest a changed table/design and was asked to explain why would i suggest those changes. Just by looking at that single page document, I didn't understand the problem itself and didn't know what to suggest. I spent 23 hours just looking at the problem and on the 24th hour I did make a suggestion and send them my reply. But didn't work ..... i never heard back from Verizon.
As a UI Designer, I have worked wiith lots of UX Designer and all I know about UX design is that you have to understand the problem very carefully. You need to look for all posible solutions and use the one that would best satisfies the usesr needs. And then you must know how to create wireframes.
Ask them how they would go about designing the UI for some system. Tell them to design a solution for some domain which you know well (for example one of your recent projects), so that in the interview you can take the role of the user. Then the UX consultant will need to dig the necessary requirements from you, find out what is the problem that needs to be solved, and then designing and testing a solution.
Or if you want to make it easier/quicker, use a domain that everybody knows, so that he doesn't need to dig the requirements from you. For example design a system for finding out in which of the nearby restaurants you would like to eat a dinner. In one hour you should get some understanding of what the consultant is like.
Give them some screenshots* of example pages from a selection of sites, some of which you consider good, some bad, and in varying degrees. Ask them to point out good and bad features in each (and there is some good and bad in every site) and explain their thinking. If they fail to spot something obvious, prompt them with a neutral "what about X?" and see how they analyse it.
* finding these isn't hard, but a little time consuming possibly. Even better if you can give them access to an actual browser so you can go over the "live" elements
UX work is made up of two parts: Research and Design. You need to be clear which you want most emphasis on: someone who can grok out massive taxonomies and build wireframes in their sleep, vs someone who has hundreds of hours of usability lab experience. (You can find people who have both areas of expertise, but people often lean in one direction).
Beware of UX consultants who have never been embedded in a scrum team before. They will need some bedding in time. If they are used to working agency-side rather than client-side, they will be used to doing shortish research projects and then leaving. This kind of "skirmish" is quite different to the long-view you have to take when working client side.
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I have my moments of inspiration like many others -- most of them bad, with a few diamonds in the rough. Is it possible to monetize those diamonds with stakeholders or entrepreneurs without actually being the person to handle development and technical? Any avenues that you can recommend would be appreciated.
Yes it's possible but also you should consider this:
From Getting Real
Awful idea = -1
Weak idea = 1
So-so idea = 5
Good idea = 10
Great idea = 15
Brilliant idea = 20
No execution = $1
Weak execution = $1000
So-so execution = $10,000
Good execution = $100,000
Great execution = $1,000,000
Brilliant execution = $10,000,000
To make a business, you need to
multiply the two.
The most brilliant idea, with no
execution, is worth $20. The most
brilliant idea takes great execution
to be worth $20,000,000.
That's why I don't want to hear
people's ideas. I'm not interested
until I see their execution.
However I think it's possible make a draft and show it off to seal a deal.
It's possible, but consider this: how much value is there really in an undeveloped idea? You're not the only one out there with great ideas you can't implement.
Having said that, if you really think it's new and original, you might as well use the broken system to your advantage and look into patenting it.
Ideas are a dime a dozen.
Getting them out the door is where the real work is.
There's a lot more to a new product than just an idea and software development. Frankly, these are two of the easiest parts. Marketing your product and getting people to actually buy it - that's the hard part!
Depends on the nature of the idea, but if all you have is an idea, but no work, you're unlikely to find a buyer who will pay you a decent amount.
No.
Everyone has ideas. They are a dime a dozen. Less than a dime a dozen.
Ideas without implementation are wothless. You can neither get, nor deserve, any money without anybody doing any work.
Start a business, get a business loan to fund your business early on. Pay people to work for you developing said idea. Once you have early prototypes then you can start looking for outside funding and try to make returns on your initial investments.
It is possible to sell an undeveloped idea but probably almost impossible to protect it. Consider this, no matter what you do competitors are watching for quick solutions.
The only real means of protecting a niche in a market is to be the best at it, to gaurentee that a replication of your product will be a waste of money, because it will pale in comparison, due to your head start in developing the product.
In short if you can't be the best at your idea, it will be replicated and you'll be outcompeted.
Therefore,
If, and only if, you're convincing (or crazy) enough to find someone who can competitively produce your idea will you be able to monetize the idea.
In general I would say no. Investors will at least want to see a prototype.
If your idea is amenable and you are willing to do some work, you may be able to take your idea and sell it as a consulting engagement to a company. You can structure the agreement to keep the rights to your software. I've worked on a project like this before.
Of course, you could always build a time machine and travel back to 1995 where you could sell ideas without having anything built.
You said that you have potentially money-making ideas, in moments of inspiration, and that most of them are bad. I suspect most of us are like that.
How do you tell which ideas are bad and which are good? It's usually impossible to do so without trying them out. If you're willing to go out and work on one, you're at least showing that you have confidence in that one. If you aren't willing to, why am I to have confidence in your idea? Give me some reason to believe somebody (perhaps you) thinks it a good idea. (Alternatively, you could try patenting it, which last I heard cost about ten thousand dollars or more in the US, but that could also turn me against the idea.)
How do you handle a situation where I might have had the same idea, and for whatever reason didn't pursue it? I'm not interested in giving you money if I implement an idea I came up with independently. If you tell me the idea, I can always (honestly or otherwise) claim I had it also. I'm not interested in signing anything that restricts my actions in the future (like the ability to profit off an enterprise without cutting you in) unless I get something for it. I'm also not interested in putting myself in the crosshairs of a lawsuit if I start a business and you think it was from your idea. I have no business reason to listen to your idea unless I already have some confidence it will be profitable to me, and for that see the paragraph above.
Ideas come to everybody. I have ideas. You have ideas. Why should I pick an idea that gives you a cut of the profits, when I can pick an idea I had myself? Sure, I probably overestimate the value of my own ideas, but you probably do also.
You see people making lots of money for no particularly good reason, an author cleaning up on a book that's not all that good, a financial analyst getting millions while bankrupting his company, that sort of thing. What you don't see is that those people put in a lot of time and work to get into that position, where they could profit unfairly. If you're willing to put in that effort, maybe you can get an undeserved profit too.
So, if you have an idea that could be worth millions, get a start on it. Don't try to profit from it without something to show, preferably something that shows off advantages without giving away the whole idea. That shows that one person, at least, has some confidence in the idea. It puts you out in front, if only slightly, and demonstrates that you're probably the logical person to keep going with the idea. It allows you to discuss possible ways to exploit it without giving away the whole thing. It allows me to save face; rather than admit that you have better ideas than mine, it allows me to finance you on the basis of something tangible. (Never expect somebody to pay you just for being smarter than they are. If you are, they won't want to admit it. If not, well, why should they pay you?)
I run a small software shop and over the last 20 years I've had dozens of people approach me with ideas. Most were users who were thrilled to simply see their ideas brought to fruition. Some were convinced, as you appear to be, that they had the "next big thing" and just needed a programmer to make it work. One guy actually sent me a "non-disclosure" agreement that would have, in essence, given him ownership of everything I developed in our field forever after signing the NDA. His "logic" was that his idea was so wonderful that anything I ever thought of after hearing it would be colored by his brilliance! Obviously, I threw it away and he faded into obscurity.
My take is that ideas are free, period. If you don't have the wherewithal or initiative to turn your idea into a real product, or even just a prototype, then you simply have no claim that anyone else need honor. My apologies if this sounds harsh but I've simply been at this too long to buy into the proposition that the people who do the actual work should owe anything to people who just free-associate.
If you do put in the effort to make the idea real, then you are owed the full protections of the copyright and patent laws to the extent that they apply.
First : You should discuss your idea with people you know who are good in that technical domain. They will tell you if 1. The product is worthy 2. There is nothing like it in the market already.
You could then try venture capitalists with your market analysis. There you might have to justify as in why you don't want to develop the product but want the money up front.
There are people who would buy the idea but the chances are slim if there is no prototype at least.
Genius is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration.
-- Thomas Edison
If you don't have the time to develop your idea, you might have to be satisfied with giving it to others and watch it flourish. Or else, found a company, hire a CTO and CEO, and offload the implementation work. You might then have to be satisfied with only a small fraction of the company.
Professors give away their ideas to "student entrepreneurs" all the time, trying to get them to actively perform implementation work. The professors would co-found and then provide consultation to the company.
Yes, it is possible to sell idea/s. But before that just google it if your idea is already implemented or already stolen by someone else. Its a huge world with common thoughts. Every time google disappoints me by showing number of results of my (so called unique) ideas. But keep trying, you may be Genius.
Get yourself a sales guy that has no problem selling "vapourware".
Then when he's sold a version of it, code like mad to get it done.
Unethical, maybe, but if you can pull it off, it'll get a startup up and running nice and quickly.
How do you know it's a good idea? Evaluate your idea, assess the market it will play in, identify experts or talent that could implement the idea, create a rough marketing plan or launch plan, make some blue sky revenue guesses, and figure out the next smallest possible step towards realizing the idea (that is, plant your first milestone).
Now bounce all this around friends, and business people asking for evaluation. Take it to your local Small Business Developer Center and see if they have advisors that you can meet (most have some type of network of retired executives).
If (and it's a big if) you have the capability to implement the idea than yes, you might get angel round funding, a business loan or a team of excited volunteers willing to sweat for equity. That first milestone is key for some investors - "Fund me to this point and then we'll sit down and look at what we've got and re-evaluate and hopefully decide to continue funding."
Ideas are cheap. Implementation takes money, time and especially effort. And it's effort that is valuable.
If you just want to jot down your ideas and sell them, just write a book of ideas.
I would probably buy your idea if it would be so great.
For me ***the lack of idea is the issu***e, I would stand up for its execution (after its evaluation of course).
Not sealing a deal here, but startups would not be able to pay for the idea, instead they would be able to make you co-founder, stakeholder or similar when they will start implementing your idea.
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I guess, the following is a standard problem on every school or university:
It is Your job to teach programming. Unfortunately, some of the students
are semi-professionals and have years of experience while others do not even know the basic concepts, e.g. the concept "typed variable".
As far as I know, this leads to one of the following situations:
Programming is tought from its very basics. The experienced students get bored and discontinue to visit the lectures. As a consequence, they will miss even the stuff they do not already know.
Teachers and professors claim that they require basic knowledge (whatever that means). Inexperienced students cannot follow the lectures and a lot of them will focus on unimportant stuff (e.g. understanding every detail of a complex example while not getting the concept behind the example). Some of them will give up.
Universities invent an artificial programming language to give experienced programmers and newbies "equal chances". Most students will get frustrated about the "useless language".
Is there a fourth solution, which is better than those above?
IMO this is a problem based on the placement of the students, not something you should be too interested in dealing with on your end as a teacher.
If the course is an introduction to programming a computer, then you really need to start with the basics. If you have a classroom full of professionals who know how to program and they don't show, it was either a problem with your course description, or the school forcing them to take the class as a pre-req without allowing them to test out.
Your job should be to describe what you want to teach in the course description, and teach it. If students enroll who are overqualified, that's their problem. I think the only thing you really need to avoid is trying to make the course too advanced for beginners if your course really is for beginners.
I think the best way to keep it interesting is to bring up practical and interesting exercises along the theory. Taking a problem-solution approach is great (with interesting, funny, exciting, real-world problems). This requires the professor himself to have hands-on experience, work with new technologies and know them pretty well and not just teach what he had learned a couple decades ago.
The thing is, programming should be learned by practice. The instructor should focus on motivating students to code and try to solve problems themselves. This can be done by assigning a complete life-like project at the beginning of the course and working through the subproblems that occur in the project in the class. This way, students will have an idea why some specific feature in the programming language exists and where it might be useful.
Just a thought though. Not tried it! ;)
I recently attended a course in which there was a very wide spectrum of experience in programming among the students. They still managed to keep the experienced programmers in the class interested by having an exercise program in which they timed the practical parts of the exercises (the programming part), and posted the results in a high score chart. At the end of each lecture, the professor gave some pointers as to how we could improve our times even more. As we all know, all engineers love competing for topping such lists, so we kept showing up, and even learned a new thing or two.
The inexperienced students managed to complete the exercises too, even if they didn't care too much about their times.
Don't know if your course is one that can implement this solution, but if it is, you should really consider it.
I think there are a couple if things you can do to help bridge the gap between advanced and beginner students and to keep everyone interested and involved in the course.
Advanced Workshops
If it can be arranged (using PHD students etc.) run an optional weekly workshop which anyone can attend, but which is aimed at the more experianced students. Set a code task / challange each week and then at the workshop go through various solutions to the problem and discuss the implications and the theory behind the different choices.
This provides an interesting challange for the more experianced coders as they have something to get thier teeth into. It opens some debate and can help intermediate people grasp interesting concetps and if you get people to present thier solutions, it introduces an open reviewing style which is beneficial. It also helps the beginners in that you don't have to present them with really advanced concepts in the main lecture series just to keep the experienced people interested.
Student Involvement
Experienced people generally are experienced because they enjoy coding etc. and a lot of people love to share their knowledge. A really good way to use this, and to help both beginners and advanced students is to get the more advanced students involved in the teaching. If you run classes/labs where students complete exercises, try getting volunteers from the more experienced students to act as mentors/ supervisors for the labs. When the beginners struggle they can help out by explaining fine details or subtleties etc.
This can really help the beginners, as there are never usually enough staff available for everyone to be able to ask individual questions. It can also really benefit the more advanced people, as having to explain concept which you "know" is a great way to reinforce them in your own mind, and even to discover that you have subtle misunderstandings in your own knowledge.
Don't assume more than you need to; try to select programming environments which don't have too much intellectual baggage. You may think a C "Hello world" program is simple, but that requires understanding source files, compilation, static typing and block structuring. There are not easy concepts for a beginner. In comparison, typing "print 'hello world'" into a Python shell avoids them. Declarations, compound types, object orientation, pointers, floating point, recursion, modularity, threads, callbacks, modularity, networking, databases and so on are all major concepts which require effort to learn. And, there are plenty of fun things to be done without them. Your goal should be to get everyone in the group doing programming exercises as soon as possible.
Mixed ability teaching is hard; stream it by splitting the group up if you can. Maybe publish a quiz of basic concepts, and have an optional basic concepts section for those who didn't get 100%. Some people think they are experienced programmers but have misunderstood basic ideas.
If the course time available is too short to let people try lots of exercises, then I'd drop the more advanced material before I dropped practical work.
In one course I took, a large part of the course grade was derived from a end-of-term project which was announced in advance with extra credit available for assorted add-ons and frills. Sufficiently experienced student could start working on it while their less prepraed brethren were being taught the basics.
But as Dave Markle says, part of this is a matter of getting the right students into your class: you really want a cohort that is fiarly well matched at the start.
If you have many experienced students or this is an upperclassmen/graduate level-course, you should focus on integration into existing ecosystem. Being able to understand and integrate into an existing project rather than to always work from scratch is the most important skills you can give to give to those students.
Thus, programming assignments should come from real world scenarios. E.g., assign them tasks in an open source project. This can also make it more interesting, especially as their work may become part of a real world project.
If it's really beginners, tough luck, you will have to stick to the basics though if the students are non-CS majors, you can create problems from their own domains (e.g., engineering, chemistry, etc.)
I think your could be toast.
After some point, the difference is just to wide. It will take the whole year to get the beginners to the point that they can even understand stuff that wont bore the more advanced people.
However this clearly depends on the topic and setting. For some combinations of those the solution is teach to the level that the class is billed for. Those that are to advance will get board and quit, those that are to inexperienced with fall behind and quit. Don't worry about it to much as neither should have taken the class anyway. If on the other hand they need to take the class then some one further up the ladder messed up.
Sitting in your chair watching someone talk is boring (even if you talk well).
Things are interesting if you can achieve something, when you can manipulate the world and have a moment of success. So add as many practical exercises as you can and make really sure that they can do them in time and that they can do them successfully in time.
Nothing is more frustrating than to hear: "Well, I'm sorry that you couldn't complete it. You can find a solution here. Let's copy that and pretend it did work and move on." Examples during a course are simple and the people in front of you know that. So if they can't even solve the simple examples you bring along for them, what are they going to think?
I always think it is best to learn through practice. At the beginning of the course especially it is incredibly boring to teach language syntax in a lecture. It is far better to require your students to complete some work on their own or in a lab with assistants. This allows the more experienced students to get through the work quickly.
Once this is done you can have a lecture where you discuss some of the solutions to problems. Why they are good and why they are bad.
This works especially well if you also structure your course in such a way that students are always building on their rpevious work. The first week can be something simple like calculate how many days old I am from my birthday. A problem that is relatively simple mathematically but has a few weird cases. This might take several hours for someone inexperienced. Especially if they are learning syntax at the same time. But it gives them a simple goal to work toward.
After this you can expend on it. eg: take lasts weeks program and add functionality that allows it to batch process a file. This teaches people the importance of restructuring and refactoring, and can be expanded week after week. You may even want to distribute a good piece of work from the previous week for those that are falling behind to use. Obviously you will need to make sure people don't get too far behind, but this is a nice way to make sure that everyone feels that they have a fair shot at it even if their previous week's work wasn't too good. Those who are doing well will end
The key is to keep your lecture sessions relatively high level, and have people learn the syntax on their own, or with lab assistants. You can teach them different ways of thinking about a problem but the actual act of writing code is much easier to learn by doing it.
I once through a scheduling nightmare ended up teaching a beginner class and an advanced class in the same classroom at the same time. What I did was divide my time between the two levels by starting out giving the advanced group an assignment to do in class while I worked with the beginners and then giving the beginners an assignment while I worked with the advanced. You could do something similar (only having the groups self-select into the group they wanted to be in). Prepare some extra material for the more advanced ones and you are off to the races.
Another strategy is to keep everything at the beginner level, but offer the more advanced students some other material to do for extra credit (or even as substitution for some of the simpler tasks you require of the beginners). Discuss the more advanced assignments with them outside of class or individually while the class is working on practical work in the lab.
Keeping the lectures interesting with plenty of real world examples is helpful too. I tended to lecture as little as possible though and present the material more through class discussion and practical exercises and through asking leading questions. Making them find the information to answer your questions (and class participation was part of the grade) will make them pay more attention.
I also ended each semester with a course project that I only described what they had to do in order to get a B. An A would involve doing work beyond that including work in an area not covered in class. The more advanced students can then really shine by looking for really cool new things to do and even the beginners usually find a way to do something not covered by the course. It's amazing how much extra effort they will go to when they don't know how much more they have to do to get an A. Other instructors would be amazed at the quality of the end of the course projects I got and several of them started using the same method.
It may be better to break up a few areas of concern with what some would call, "Introductory Programming":
1) Introduction to personal computers and modern computing. Assuming that the course's software runs on windows, there may be some that need to cover the basics of a computer, e.g. what is a hard drive, keyboard, mouse, monitor, CPU, motherboard, etc. Note that this has nothing to do with even one line of code other than naming operating systems potentially. For some people this may be new to them and thus having a course that covers the basics, may well be worth it. Also in this course would be ways to use a mouse and all its various buttons, what are the various kinds of cables and connections people have, what are drivers, what are patches, what are parts of a network, e.g. firewall, router, load balancers, etc. The idea here isn't to get into how to configure a firewall perfectly, but rather that the person understands what various hardware components are for and possibly how to configure a home wireless network as the most complicated concepts taught.
2) Principles of programming. This would start with the idea of what are the steps are there to execute a sequence of commands. Things like printing and performing Mathematical operations, e.g. converting from Imperial to metric,would be covered with possibly sorting being the most complicated example, viewed from a variety of different algorithms and an understanding at a basic level of big-O notation.
3) Introduction to Data Structures and Advanced Programming. Now, let's introduce the concept of a relational database and how databases work in general and have projects with real world application, e.g. have each student take a list of something they have like DVDs or CDs and put these into a database schema to efficiently store all this data. Also, the idea of floating point arithmetic and its limitations, e.g. that a computer doesn't store the whole value of pi but rather an approximation that should be good enough in most cases.
4) Introduction to Parallel Programming and Operating Systems. Here you would have some in depth work in building an Operating System and handling how to write code that can run concurrently or in Parallel and how efficient are various programs under different circumstances.
That is how I could see someone breaking up programming so that it isn't where someone can learn in a week enough to pass the final without looking at anything else.
I have frequently been in this situation, first on the student side of things, and then on the teaching side.
Most schools force those sort of courses and their curriculum. This is silly, but such is life. If your school does allow it, I would suggest offering students attendance waiver if they pass an early screening test. It is in your interest and the interest of the freshmen to not sit in a class where a significant portion of the population is bored. Even being in a room with tons of people starting at their laptops harms discourse. Everyone is required to attend tests and submit assignments, but they at least don't have to show up.
Once you work with the novices, figure out if they're majors or nonmajors. Nonmajors will resent being in a CS course, you have to try and make it approachable for them. E.g., use examples from physics or chemistry or math rather than from building an interactive gui system.
If they're CS majors, they'd better damned be interested :)
My opinion is that teaching sample programs is dead-boring for most people. Searching, sorting, classification of 7-bit ascii input, using unix & make, opening a file, writing a file...
These are boring problems. Regardless of their importance/usefulness, these are tools. Unfortunately, tools are what's taught in intro courses, not problems.
But you need tools to be able to solve a problem. So it's a kind of chicken-egg problem.
Real world examples of code the student can imagine themselves doing out of their free time.
I remember a teacher telling me to use const values it was the tax of something. I only had to use the value in two places. She asked what if i need to change it i said its only in two places and i'll change it by hand also i couldnt imagine the gov ever changing the tax %.
I cant think of an non complex example where i would use a const so i wouldnt try teaching them to use that but for arrays i would simply write a guessing game then when the player wins the game, it plays back all the guesses in the same order to them. There is no easy way to do that w/o arrays and i could see how keeping track of someones steps/guesses would be useful (bragging rights to how quickly a person guessed it).
On the first day give the syllabus (what they will learn) and required basic knowlege (things you must know or else not take this class) and stick with it. After these all you can do is teach well (explain things well, answer questions, give a joke or two now and then etc). Caring who attends class, whether or not the field is boring, whether student lied about pre-requisites or not, who listens and the other yada yada is beyond your controls. Besides, you should expect adults to be adults. If students skip class and ace test, maybe that is best for them. If they skip class and bomb tests, well maybe they are in the wrong place.
I hated when professors had this mentality when I was in college. Now as a working professional I understand it.
Center the programming exercises around either sports or movies.
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My question is how can you teach the methods and importance of tidying-up and refactoring code?
Background
I was recently working on a code review for a colleague. They had made some modifications to a long-gone colleagues work. During the new changes, my colleague had tried to refactor items but gave up as soon as they hit a crash or some other problem (rather than chasing the rabbit down the hole to find the root of the issue) and so reimplemented the problem code and built more on top of that. This left the code in a tangle of workarounds and magic numbers, so I sat down with them to go through refactoring it.
I tried to explain how I was identifying the places we could refactor and how each refactoring can often highlight new areas. For example, there were two variables that stored the same information - why? I guessed it was a workaround for a bigger issue so I took out one variable and chased the rabbit down the hole, discovering other problems as we went. This eventually led to finding a problem where we were looping over the same things several times. This was due in no small part to the use of arrays of magic number sizes that obfuscated what was being done - fixing the initial "double-variable" problem led to this discovery (and others).
As I went on this refactoring journey with my colleague, it was evident that she wasn't always able to grasp why we made certain changes and how we could be sure the new functionality matched the original, so I took the time to explain and prove each change by comparing with earlier versions and stepping through the changes on paper. I also explained, through examples, how to tell if a refactoring choice was a bad idea, when to choose comments instead of code changes, and how to select good variable names.
I felt that the process of sitting together to do this was worthwhile for both myself (I got to learn a bit more about how best to explain things to others) and my colleague (they got to understand more of our code and our coding practices) but, the experience led me to wonder if there was a better way to teach the refactoring process.
...and finally...
I understand that what does or does not need refactoring, and how to refactor it are very subjective so I want to steer clear of that discussion, but I am interested to learn how others would tackle the challenge of teaching this important skill, and if others here have had similar experiences and what they learned from them (either as the teacher or the student).
Like most programming, refactoring skill comes with practice and experience. It would be nice to think it can be taught, but it has to be learned - and there is a significant difference in the amount of learning that can be accomplished in different environments.
To answer your question, you can teach refactoring methods and good design in a pedagogical fashion, and that's fine. But, ultimately, you and I both know attaining a certain level is only through long hard experience.
I am not 100% to understand your question but I think you can refer yourself to Code Smell that need to be refactored.It contain a lot of example that you could show to other.
Here is a list of when refactoring should be used (list of code smell)
If you haven't read it, Martin Fowler has an excellent book on the subject called Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. He goes into substantial detail about how and why a specific piece of code should be refactored.
I hesitated to even mention it for fear that knowledge of this book is assumed by someone asking about refactoring, and that you would think, "Duh, I meant besides the Fowler book." But what the hey, there you go. :-)
You don't mention tests. To 'prove' that a refactoring does not break the existing functionality you need to either have existing tests or write tests before doing the refactoring.
Pair Programming seems to be the best way for me to get this across. This way, as we're working on real, production code, and we both encounter some code that doesn't smell right, we tackle a code refactoring together. The pair acts as the driver's conscience saying to do the right thing instead of the quick fix, and in turn, they both learn what good code looks like in the process.
Refactoring can be an art, and just takes practice. The more you do it, the better you get at it. Keep studying the methods described in Martin Fowler's Ractoring book, and use your tools (Resharper for Visual Studio folk)
One simple way to conceive of refactoring is right there in the name -- it's just like when you factor a common variable out of an equation:
xy + xz
becomes
x(y + z)
The x has been factored out. Refactoring code is the same thing, in that you're finding duplicate code or logic and factoring it out.
It sounds like your approach is a very good one. At the end of the process, you showed how you were able to uncover and fix a lot of problems. For educational purposes, it could then be interesting to invent a new change/enhancement/fix. You could then ask your mentoree how they would enact that change with the old a new codebase. Hopefully they'll see that it's much easier to make the new change with the refactored code (or how doing more refactoring would be the easiest way to prepare for the hypothetical change).
I see a couple of different ways you could try to teach refactoring:
Given textbook-like examples. A downside here is that you may have contrived or simplistic examples where why refactoring is useful doesn't necessarily shine through as well as in other cases.
Refactoring existing code. In this case you could take existing legacy code that you'd clean up, or your own code in development and show the before and after doing various bits to see how much better the after is, in terms of readability and ease of maintanence. This may be a better exercise to do as this is live code being improved and enhanced to some extent.
It isn't something that someone can pick up instantly, it takes time, practice, effort and patience as some refactorings may be done for personal preference rather than because the code runs optimally one way or another.
Teaching someone to refactor when they aren't a natural is a tough job. In my experience your best bet is to sit down with them in an office and refactor some code. While you are doing this keep up a "stream of consciousness" dialog. Talk about what you see, why the code doesn't smell right, options to refactor to, etc. Also you should make sure they're doing the same thing. The most important thing is to impart why, not how, to change the code. Any decent programmer can make a change and have it work, but it takes skill and experience to be able to state why the new solution is better than the previous.