Never Stop Making. NSM.

After graduating from my DEC in CS, I see many of my fellow-graduating students having done little-to-no work (as per their GitHub activity). Some have changed career paths and that is entirely reasonable, but those who are continuing their education in Computer Science don't seem to really be doing anything.

I don't mean that they aren't doing anything, after all we are all in school, but I mean that people don't seem to have the drive to make, to do.

Computer Science is a wide generalization covering such a diverse domain. In this case, I'm talking about the most popular form of it in modern discussion, obviously I'm referring to Programming. The majority of people in their CS education that I've seen tend to lack passion to do extra work alongside their school work, and that's fair, CS isn't exactly a walk in the park. My issue with this though is that Programming is our form of art. As Computer Scientists, we more or less operate and think through a lens of logic. I have no doubts that the many of the CS students that I know would be able to build a technically interesting _ project (that is, if you still consider a _ChatGPT SDK interesting... I know I don't..). The big issue that they run into though, and this is something you often see at hackathons and coding events in general, is that their projects have no appeal or unique element.

Building a project is more than coding the backend. You have to pour loads of effort into the UI/UX, the business logic, marketability, functionality, scalability, etc.

When you only focus on school and learning you completely miss out on being able to round yourself out as a programmer.

Ignoring coding outside of a school environment, you also fall behind in regards to modern technologies, potential things that may interest you, the world of CS is constantly expanding and school simply isn't enough to make good in the field. Make things.

Keep making things. Keep growing more and more comfortable with technologies. Keep expanding and diversifying your skill set, discovering new bits and pieces of things that pique your interest. Fall in love with Computer Science.