Simon Willison’s Weblog

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32 items tagged “careers”

2011

Would having a maths degree put you at that much of a disadvantage against a CS student when it comes to jobs?

No. Plenty of the great programmers I know have maths, physics or even literature degrees. Read a couple of classic computer science text books and get some programming projects under your belt and you’ll be fine.

[... 64 words]

2010

Why is Java perceived as not cool for startups? We seem to be getting a lot of feedback lately that a startup should be using Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, etc., if they want to be agile and iterate quickly.

You should re-evaluate your beliefs. Dynamic language programmers spend a great deal of time thinking about code quality and maintainability. TDD (and BDD), which I believe was first popularised within the Ruby community) are extremely widespread, and profiling and debugging tools are widely used and constantly improved. A strong test suite provides far more effective protection against bugs than static typing and an IDE.

[... 152 words]