NYCPHP Meetup

[Kenneth Downs]

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
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