I’ve always been the type of person who only gets the motivation to do something if there is some useful practical reason for doing so. It therefore probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that I hated the majority of my mostly theoretical computer science degree.

I was talking to one of my colleagues last week and came out of the conversation convinced that the desire to know the theory behind concepts is amplified when you actually get to see it in action in a real life system.

My prime example is multi threading and concurrency. At university we had to write a program to calculate e to 500 decimal places using multi threading. In my mind this exercise was completely pointless, and I don’t think I came out of it any wiser with regards to threading.

Contrast that to the project I’m working on now where the main window of our application was freezing up due to an expensive operation being run on the UI thread. The solution of course was to execute the expensive operation on a background thread.

Although I know this is a fairly trivial example, it did provide a real life situation where threading was required. As a result of this I have become much more interested in the specifics of threading and the potential problems that can arise when doing so.

It would probably actually prove more useful to see the concepts in action in a real life system before being taught the detailed theory behind how it all fits together. For me at least when I’m learning about something I like to have a reference point and having seen the concept in action would provide this.

It seems obvious to me therefore that studying for a degree after having first done a few years in industry would probably lead to you having a much richer learning experience and a much improved understanding. Not that I expect that to catch on!