Vancouver, Washington / Portland, Oregon
This conversation took place late last night on Slack:
Student: Bruce I see you the Sublime Text editor.
Bruce: I have tried many of them out and prefer Sublime.
Student: I want to be a professional web developer one day. I also have some questions about the assignment that’s due tomorrow.
Bruce: A professional web developer wouldn’t start a project the day before it was due.
Student: Only the good pros do.
Bruce: It better be perfect then.
Many thanks to Tommy Henriksen and Glen Sobel of the Alice Cooper band for letting me sit behind Glen’s drums at the Tacoma, Washington show. More on Tommy and the show coming soon.
I’m thankful for the experiences throughout my careers at UL, SHARP, OpenNTF, Elguji and Clark College that exposed me to international business, world culture, diversity, and humanity. A day doesn’t go by when I am not working or talking with people from all over the world.
Thank you to all of you who were part of those experiences.
Continuing on from my list of “College Student Worst Practices” post:
Worst Practice No. 4:
Waiting until the day an assignment is due to ask the instructor for assistance. As soon as an assignment is announced or made available, read through it in its entirety at least once and maybe twice. Don’t simply do the assignment to hit the rubric marks as quite often there is more to the assignment than what appears in the rubric.
Worst Practice No. 5:
Expecting to learn everything you need to learn during class. Also, expecting to finish your work in class.
Worst Practice No. 6:
Not reading the syllabus. A course syllabus is a contract between the instructor and each and every student. It contains all of the things that a student will need to know about assignments, exams, late work policies, how a student’s grade will be determined, a statement about procedures and school policies for students with disabilities and much more. Neglecting to read it at the beginning of the class and every now and then is also not a good thing to do.
What does the syllabus really say? All of the things that you are going to ask tomorrow.
Worst Practice No. 1:
From an email sent to students: “If you have read this far and want 3 extra credit points, send a message to me by Tuesday at noon.” 5 days later and only 2 people replied.
If your teacher/instructor ever offers you extra credit points for reading a weekly announcement email, respond to them as soon as you read the words “extra credit”.
Worst Practice No. 2:
Don’t wait until the assignment or exam due date to ask for an extension. It’s ok to ask for an extension (in my classes). Communicate early and often. It’s ok. I’m human and sometimes life happens and I get that.
Worst Practice No. 3:
If you are the smartest person in the classroom, and you know more than most people, don’t use that as the platform to challenge or prove that the instructor is dumber than you or that you are smarter than everyone else, use it as an opportunity to help others in the class that may be struggling.
If you’re looking for a new gig or career, I wanted to share this list of hiring red flags publicly. These things to watch out for will vary by industry and company, but if you’re looking for a position at a startup, an agency, or something in the online industry, this list may help you avoid ending up in the immediate ‘no’ pile.
Here’s the sound a blind person hears when their screen reader reads your email aloud that only contains a graphical image announcing an event:
“Image, Event announcement”
Pro Tip: Don’t send email messages that have all the content in your super cool Photoshop/MSPaint graphic.
They are what philosopher Harry Frankfurt would call “bullshitters.” Those that are giving advice for the sake of giving advice, without any regard as to how it is actually implemented, if it can even be implemented at all. “It’s not important to [the bullshitter] what the world really is like,” he says in a short video documentary about the phenomenon (below). “What is important is how he’d like to represent himself.”
…
This Bullshit Industrial Complex has always existed. But thanks to the precarious economics and job prospects of the creative person, it is often in a creative’s financial interest to climb the bullshit pyramid. In the short term, it’s creating a class of (often young) creatives deluded into thinking they are doing something meaningful by sharing “advice.” Long term, it’s robbing us of a creative talent.
OH: NodeJS + MongoDB is this generation’s Laurel and Hardy stack (“look at this mess you got me into”). Last generation’s was PHP + MySQL
— Stephan H. Wissel (@notessensei) June 9, 2016
Recent Comments