It's fair to say that the tech industry at the moment is not in a good place. Software engineers tend to be detached, demotivated and unwilling to care much about the work they're doing beyond their paycheck. Code quality is poor on the whole, made worse by the current spate of vibe coding and whatever other febrile ideas come out of Sam Altman's brain. Much of the software that we write is either useless or actively hurts people. And the talented, creative people that we most need in the industry are pushed to the margins of it.
Another excellent piece from Iris Meredith - strongly recommend reading if you want an idea of how to un-fuck software as a field.
The point about a static site generator being an ideal intro project is well-taken. I’m working my way through Practical Common Lisp right now, as it’s recommended as one of the best CL intro books, and its intro project of an MP3 database is only barely relevant to me because I still have a stash of MP3s I started building up around the time of the book’s original publication.
I struggle to imagine what might supplant the HTML generator suggestion in the future. If anything, its desirability is made more apparent by the proliferation of JS monoliths all over the Web. You can show students how quickly it renders compared to a corporate website or heavyweight social-media feed, use that as an introduction to performance considerations and profiling, introduce modularity by bolting on a more dynamic framework piece-by-piece…
I struggle to imagine what might supplant the HTML generator suggestion in the future.
I can’t really think of anything to supplant it either. The only addition I can think of would be some complementary arts education, to build students’ creative abilities and further highlight the expressive elements of software.
The point about a static site generator being an ideal intro project is well-taken. I’m working my way through Practical Common Lisp right now, as it’s recommended as one of the best CL intro books, and its intro project of an MP3 database is only barely relevant to me because I still have a stash of MP3s I started building up around the time of the book’s original publication.
I struggle to imagine what might supplant the HTML generator suggestion in the future. If anything, its desirability is made more apparent by the proliferation of JS monoliths all over the Web. You can show students how quickly it renders compared to a corporate website or heavyweight social-media feed, use that as an introduction to performance considerations and profiling, introduce modularity by bolting on a more dynamic framework piece-by-piece…
I can’t really think of anything to supplant it either. The only addition I can think of would be some complementary arts education, to build students’ creative abilities and further highlight the expressive elements of software.