Kind of tying in the continuing education and also programs not being very robust, my attendance to University of Phoenix has been pretty lame overall. Honestly I've had two classes that actually covered material that I was not familiar with, but I found that most everything taught in the class was covered in a Wikipedia article about the topic (POS 355 Introduction to Operating Systems literally covered this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system#Examples_of_operating_systems; the sections Examples of Operating Systems and Components. The other class was project management--which was nice). But in the nearly two years I have been attending I've really fallen behind on my personal learning. There are so many js libraries I want to spend time learning like AngularJS, but I just haven't had time to put into it; I also want to get Ruby under my belt; I missed the transition from web 2.0 to responsive design. But, like Walt said, UoP doesn't really dig into the abstract theory to give a basis in the material. They just give you an eBook and a "moderator" (not an instructor) and say "good luck with that." I actually ended up tutoring<http://youtu.be/I7ZkpixcJuo>my whole HTML class because no one had any idea of what was going on (but it was mostly because they covered HTML, CSS and Javascript in 5 weeks).
So with that said, what kinds of things do you like to see in a portfolio? I've been coding since Jr. High (about 18 years), but have never worked for anyone as a programmer. I have been working for the last 10 years as a pharmacy technician, but want to make the transition to programming. Anyway, any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks again for all the comments so far, they have been very insightful. I've never made it to one of the meetings (since I'm in Price) but I am going to make it a point to make it to one now! On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 11:20 AM, Walt Haas <[email protected]> wrote: > One thing about this conversation jumps out at me: the lack of mention > of continuing education. Hanging on my study wall is an attractively > framed piece of paper that says "University of Utah/Master of > Science/Computer Science". Underneath that it says "1985". Oops. > > In reality, most of what I've learned has come from my own initiative in > digging facts out of books and web sites. I did indeed learn good > things at the UoU, but the abstract theory held the most enduring value. > The more important skill over the years has been self education, which > has protected me from terminal obsolescence. > > -- Walt > > > _______________________________________________ > > UPHPU mailing list > [email protected] > http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu > IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net > _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
