Expectations of a Computing Professional

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A recent anonymous post, on a certain social media website, lamented about the quality of our Computing graduates. The poster gave examples on how some are unable to create/code websites, and the poor quality of released apps. Not surprisingly, many people rose to defend Computing students, the school, and the profession in general. The OP has, of course, made some very broad generalisations. A fundamental assumption was that every Computing graduate should be able to write programs. Some respondents argue that…

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Computer Programming

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For some time now, programming skills are tested in a practical examination at my school. It all started because, once upon a time, we found that some of our graduates leave school still without actually knowing how to write a full working program. It’s shocking and a sad truth that some computer science graduates don’t know how to program. You see, it wasn’t practical to ask students to write a full working program in a written theory examination. At best,…

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Prepping Your Mac for Programming

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The Mac is well known for doing photos, graphics, movies, and music. The fun stuff and the life stuff, if you know what I mean. That’s what many people go to the Mac for. But you know your Mac can do programming too. Definitely, right? After all, you have heard that system administrators and programmers also love the Mac. Surely there must be a good reason why they’re loving the Mac platform too? Well, the answer is mostly a resounding…

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Do Programmers Need to Understand the Underlying Platform?

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This topic came up for discussion recently. How much of the underlying technology (such as network, server, operating system, etc) does a programmer need to know in order to write good programs? A colleague held the belief that, ideally, the underlying technologies can or should be abstracted so that programmers only need to know how to program. Another person believed it is necessary for programmers to understand the platform they develop for. Abstraction is useful and important, but I, too,…

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Offline…

I just realized that I’ve been “offline” for a while. “Offline” in the sense that this blog hasn’t had any updates for almost 2 weeks now. There are a couple of reasons for it. Probably the chief reason is that I’ve been very under-the-weather lately. Then, there are also critical project milestones to meet at work. The two combined together have left me no time and no “mood” to blog anything. It’s the first time that I’m getting such an…

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Urgent Security Update to WordPress

Yes it keeps us busy even during the festive season. A number of critical security issues were identified with WordPress 2.3.1 (may apply to older versions too) that necessitated an urgent security release. WordPress 2.3.2 is now available. One of the problem is a SQL Injection Vulnerability that exposes internal information about your WordPress installation. These are common problems that plague web applications. I did a brief presentation on Secure Web Programming a few moons ago. It was primarily intended…

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