5 Rules I Had to Break to Create a Senior Project that Rules

After spending eight months on GNOME Do, I gave a brief presentation (followed by a great, not-so-brief Q&A session) to an auditorium full of Computer Science students and faculty. In the presentation, I discuss five “rules” explicitly and implicitly imposed in undergraduate Computer Science coursework that I had to break in order to create GNOME Do. I urge students studying Computer Science to break these rules too, by getting involved in free and open source software projects.


6 Comments

  • Well said! I found a lot of these rules being broken at Purdue when profs that normally taught grad students taught undergrads. They don’t care about these rules which, as you’ve so elegantly shown, hinder learning in many critical ways.

    Thanks for such an awesome project! I use Do hundreds of times a day. Ever thought about a deskbar/spotlight type interface to it? I’m a huge fan of Mac OS’s latest Spotlight.

  • A good presentation..

  • Hurrah! Serious props to you and the project. Congrats on 0.5!

  • Just notice that Do is the “Launchy for Linux Gnome”. Wonderful work.

    It is sad that I started my own open source projects after I became a graduate. I should have done more if I started in my senior year. :-)

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  • Google should know–font sizes are relative, and the container of text should also be relative.

    I can’t read the last two lines of nearly every slide because my high-resolution screen requires a 117 pixel dpi.

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