There was not a lot of time to blog during the semester, but now that it’s over and final grades have been submitted, I do want point out some of the highlights this semester. Perhaps the biggest milestone is that the first two students have graduated from the new IT program! Obviously I am somewhat
First of all, alert(“Happy New Year!”);. Let 2017 be a productive year. Speaking of productivity, over the break I came across a Simon Sinek video about millennials that has some interesting insights. I strongly recommend that you watch it fully if you are interested in self-improvement. As a millennial myself, I was especially interested in
One of the most common aspects that IT students struggle with initially is how detail oriented one has to be. If you write a program and one of the variable names is off by one letter, your program will not work. If you write an SQL query and you leave out a single quote at
Ever had to pull an all nighter because you did not quite have enough time to study all the material for the final? Or worked on a programming problem that had an annoying bug that you couldn’t find but the deadline was approaching quickly? Both of these situations can result in a significant amount of
There is a strong focus on programming in the IT program, and for good reason. Not only will students develop incredibly powerful problem solving skills, it is also true that software is ‘eating’ the world (e.g., Google, Facebook, Uber). But learning programming can be challenging, which is why we are introducing a programming game called
When learning a new IT skill it is not uncommon to experience a sense of confusion at times. This should not be looked at as problematic, as long as the confusion is resolved and a certain clarity of mind achieved. It is simply part of learning a new, sometimes difficult skill. This is even common
When we revamped the IT program a few years ago, it was our vision to use JavaScript in most of our programming courses. The reason is that we envisioned that JavaScript would become even more important than it already was. Not only is it supported by every browser, it also runs on the server through
Programming is easy to start with, but hard to master. In our IT program we mostly use JavaScript and for that you only need a text editor and a browser. But to become good at programming it takes time, effort, and persistence. In this post I will look at why programming is so hard, what
It always bothered me that we did not offer this site in a secure fashion, especially since we use accounts. Starting from yesterday, all HTTP connections default to HTTPS using TLS (SSL is not safe anymore and has been deprecated). I’ve used Let’s Encrypt to generate certificates and I’m impressed with how easy this works,
The new IT program officially launched last Fall semester with the courses CMPS 160: Databases and CMPS 161: Networking and Security. In this Spring semester we offer CMPS 162: Introduction to Programming and CMPS 163: Business Analytics. Below you can find a short overview of the courses and my experiences with the students. While the