Thus Spaketh Idd Salim

I am very sad. Really.

A good Friday it was. ‘All you can eat’ Pizza Friday @iHub, Mozilla 4.0 Bash. Hot campo chics. Campo chics with Att. Campo chics raring to go. Name it. Yote ilikuwa hapo.

When the @g33kmate (that hand-stand chic), the MC, asked people to crack jokes as an ice-breaker, all I could hear were ‘Hello World’ jokes. Possibly done in VB6. Not even one funny ‘knock-knock’ joke was to be heard. I wanted to show them how jokes should be delivered, but I was busy plugged into my Unix farm.

So, as part of my CSR, I decided to ‘dosisha macoder’. And this is where code-name lugubrious kicked in. My high-spirits were immediately transformed into utter melancholy.

What are we teaching our kids in campus? Apart from throwing stones and getting hormonal over every small thing, what else do people do in Campus?

I repeated the excercise below to about 5 random people. Here goes:

Salim: “Sema. Naitwa Salim.”;

Respondent: “Naitwa “.$name;

Salim: “What do you do?”;

$name : $response ['Comp Science','I code','PHP na MySQL','Najifunza'];

Then I would offer a simple challenge. A simple 2-question quiz. I open notepad++ and ask $name.

“Write a piece of code that will connect to the MySQL localhost and select the first 10 records from a table. Format the dates on output as yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss. Do this in 10 minutes and this KSHS 1, 000 is yours. Do not leave Notepad++”.

My God! They all failed. Not a single soul could code without Googling.

“Lemmi just Google it and I will do it in 2 minutes.”, one would request.

Yes. This is the direction we are heading. Campusers forming the copy-paste culture. People who can’t code offline. Coders who cannot write code. Coders who will never work for Google or Facebook or Yahoo. Coders who will continue writing insecure and immature code for Craft Silicon.

I even let some Google it and have it run then opened a new document and told them, “Re-type the same code here, now.”. They could not.

Back to code…

Wazi