Archive for August 2013

My Summer Vacation: Programming at Groupon

August 24, 2013, 9:46 pm

After focusing on teaching and research for the last few years, I wanted to get back to the swing of things and write some real code. Lucky for me, my good friend Ben twisted a few arms and got me a summer job with his team at Groupon (lest you doubt Groupon’s hiring practices…yes there were some technical interviews in there too). I worked on the Breadcrumb Pro team. Our app looked like this:

Capture

It’s a restaurant point-of-sale application – the system restaurants use to enter in everybody’s orders, track employee hours, generate reports, etc. This is part of Groupon’s big plans to . From a technical side, we’re talking a 100% classic client server app – iOS on the frontend, python on the back.

Ok, I admit a sense of pride looking at my commit history. Good to see I can still code when the situation requires it! :)

Ok, I admit a sense of pride looking at my commit history. Good to see I can still code when the situation requires it! 🙂

I had a great time and was pretty productive. I was initially worried three months might not be enough ramp-up time for me to be of value to my team. Within a month I coding fast and signing up for high priority stories just like everybody. It actually sort of helped that I was not particularly familiar with either iOS or python…I took stories on both sides and that really help me understand the overall architecture. Especially on the fast development cycles we were on, there wasn’t a heck of a lot of spec design. So oftentimes a single story would require a change all the way from the DB to the frontend – just understanding every layer and changing it was way easier than attempting to coordinate a hand off.

I think I’ll definitely give my students even more practice with understanding big systems – maybe even toss in one or two multilingual codebases. At the very least I managed to get a few more war stories to tell them about. By then end of it, both me and Ben were wondering why summer internships at other companies wasn’t standard practice for professional software engineers.

Of course, even though I had a great time at Groupon, I’m still very much looking forward to teaching again in a few weeks.

Category: Programming Stuff  |  Comment

ICER 2013: Undergraduate Conceptions of the Field of Computer Science

August 22, 2013, 8:21 pm

I had a great time at this year’s ICER conference – met up with some old friends and talked with some new ones about all sorts of CS education stuff. I also published a paper entitled Undergraduate Conceptions of the Field of Computer Science:

Students come to CS from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of preconceptions. Some initially select CS with a very vague idea of the field they are majoring in. In this paper, I describe CS undergraduates’ view of the field of Computer Science. The approach was qualitative and cognitive: I studied what students think CS is and how students reasoned about their courses and curriculum. Through the use of grounded theory in 37 qualitative interviews with students and student advisors, I extracted three different conceptions about CS found in undergraduate CS majors using Grounded Theory. Overall, students had reasonable views of CS at a high level but lacked specifics. Students had difficulty describing subfields of CS or anticipating the content of courses they selected.

You can download a copy if you’re curious, or see all the good stuff from ICER 2013 from the complete proceedings.

Category: Research  |  Comment