Have you noticed, if you say the word βuniversityβ to a person, how he immediately plunges into stuffy memories? There he wasted his youth on useless objects. There he received outdated knowledge, and there lived teachers who had long merged with textbooks, but did not understand anything in the modern IT industry.
To hell with everything: diplomas are not important, and universities are not needed. Is that what you all say? I think about it every day of my life, and, you know, I don't agree with it! It's worth going to uni. There are the same guys and girls with burning eyes, like you, there is a community. And together you can do a lot of new things. For example, an alternative to the educational program of a university in your city.
I saw my first computer at the age of 6 and something clicked in my head. Even then I realized that the computer is exactly what I will do with my life. The piece of iron struck me a lot, but I still had no idea how obedient this instrument was. It turned out that all the programs for it do not come from the computer manufacturer and do not appear by magic. They are written by specially trained people - programmers. Then I decided: damn it, I want to become one of them.
But first, I became that no-name that spams in VK comments with suggestions to make a website. Daredevil customers did not increase, but I stumbled upon one web studio and got my first test one.
Alas, I could not reverse the psd template (βbasket son, itβs too late, leave the computerβ). I did not despair and posted my code on a WordPress blog. Once my free hosting hacked everything that was on the blog. I started to restore the backup, and locally brought WordPress to the manifestation of SQL-Injection.
Having thus opened the world of security for myself, I went on a free search for vulnerabilities. The bookstore hacked (Krovostok started playing), the director paid me for a vulnerability in which I could view other people's orders. When I discovered an XSS vulnerability on the website of an online home appliance store, I was even asked to send a resume. Upon learning that I was 15, the operator left the chat.
And here you are, in a torn plaid shirt, with a guitar in your hands, on the morning after graduation near some panel. You wander home, from time to time making a pass to nowhere, stones meeting under your feet. And itβs time for you to make conscious decisions that will definitely take a hell of a cloud of time from you, but itβs not known whether they will bring benefits.
But I applied and was enrolled in the university.
Having entered the first year, I decided not to burden myself with unnecessary acquaintances. And on the first day I broke my rule. I met a guy about whom I thought one thing: he would definitely beat off a couple of girls from me. That's how cool he was. Ancient wisdom says: the enemy must be kept closer than friends.
Seryoga knew almost all the applicants by name, communicated with a bunch of people from all over the stream, and most importantly, he knew how to recognize good bars. Actually, we agreed on this.
I did not expect that I would find a like-minded person right away, especially since he would study with me in a group. Seryoga told a lot of incredible things. At school, he went to Samsung events, where he did mobile development projects, and at school they were good at programming. It sounded painful to me. My school was different. Somehow I decided to find any book about programming in my hometown, and found nothing but Talmuds about long-extinct languages, the existence of which I still doubt.
I ended up hooking up with a talented mobile developer and we started doing all kinds of stuff together. They immediately recruited more guys to join their team. With pathos, they called themselves Blurred Technologies - from the age of 16 I dreamed of my own company with that name.
I don't know if you read my twitter, but what just happened in my new student life. We hacked furiously. Wool all city IT events with a ringing head - either from a hangover, or from lack of sleep. Once we wrote a chat bot with speech recognition for the IT daughter of RosAtom. They did without fashionable training of machines and neural networks. 5 hours by all twitter. Over beer, they came up with their own IDE for Python with a fancy name - CreamPy. And for the funniest photo contest at the hackathon (where the prize was a couple of bottles of whiskey), they made such a funny photo that the orgies banned it as obscene and completely canceled the contest - I fell asleep on a chair with a whitefish in my teeth, an energy drink in my hand and my head thrown back ... Before University, my life has never pulsated with such force and frequency!
Hackathons are hackathons, but we decided that itβs not only about having fun and having fun, itβs time to be useful.
We had some experience in application development and we were good at current technologies in IT. Most of them are not taught at the university, at least in ours, and we were not happy with that. We wanted the pervaks, who have not yet decided, to find themselves. The subject "Introduction to the direction" did not help them in this, but in fact turned out to be a retelling of the curriculum with a pack of passive aggression from the teacher. After your attempt to answer the question, he blushed so much that it became clear that the man wants you to have an electric chair. You quote Knuth and Tannenbaum, but he simply calls it nonsense and quotes words from the book of a now deceased colleague from the pulpit. With all due respect, but what did this book give to programming? Do you know what "naked" is? Me not.
So we decided to do our "introduction to the direction" with Munchkin and the copywriters. The first thing we did was to really alarm student groups on social networks with our surveys. Most of the feedback was from first and second year students. According to the answers, it became clear that most of them either did not program at all, or poked something at school in computer science (hello, Pascal). And of course, everyone was interested in game development, application development, and in general an understanding of application programming.
Through polls, another team of talented guys also came to us. Without hesitation, we started a collab with them, coughed up plans for the semester ahead, and the work began to boil.
The colleagues with whom we decided to lecture together got a sniff of gunpowder in production and decided that everything would be like an adult. Therefore, each report was reviewed by several people, then a detailed rehearsal, and only then received the right to appear in the lecture program. We've been preparing for weeks as if there was a damn presentation of a new iPhone ahead. As a result, we blinded about three reports, somehow found a free audience and finally released!
Wow! 150 people came to the opening. We told students about working with the command line, databases, how to design and develop mobile and web applications.
We were surrounded by burning eyes, and we very quickly began to burn out - the preparation of each lecture took too much time. There were many problems. We didn't have our own corner. Speakers, students like us, merged one by one, and our audience increasingly caught apathy before the upcoming session.
And there was this. Do you know people who fall for a trendy thing, but in fact they are not interested in it, and they just pretend to be socially active? There are such. And I'm still curious, why come to my performance, and at the same time sit on your phone or laptop? Hey, I'm not background music! I put my efforts into it, spent time, knocked out a stream, alarmed people. I didn't sleep at night. I've come to tell you something you might need. Kamon, you yourself came to me, I did not drag you! So what the hell?
And now you are already pretty shabby, you begin to understand the embittered teachers who are being tortured by the system and students for many years. But you are not them, not these gray ruins, you are still young, you just need to shake yourself, pull yourself together, exhale and try again. Or fucking give up.
We took an indefinite hiatus. The collab fell apart. Me and my buddy Seryoga started a normal student life - we were coding, drinking and having fun. A whole year has flown by. We thought a lot about returning. New fighters entered the faculty by the hundreds, rumors spread around the faculty that we were up to something - but we werenβt up to anything at all.
People asked when new events would start, offered new ideas on format and topics. No one knew our names, no one knew who we were, but everyone understood that there is Blurred Technologies, and they are up to something again. We needed a new plan.
Hallelujah, a new site has appeared on campus - the Boiling Point. There it was possible with impunity and with minimal effort to get a place for lectures on almost any day. We firmly decided not to inflate the staff and production any more, we dubbed the Blurred Education project (well, how about it). The release rate of the material accelerated to three days. In the new iteration, with a new ideology, we began to go out more often and gather much more people than it was at the start. We charged people and learned to charge from them.
We had a cadre of charismatic speakers, a huge desire to contribute, hundreds of interested eyes, and a whole sea of ββββinteresting topics, technologies and enthusiasm, as well as support from GitHub, local IT communities, a shelf of Computer Science classics and a stock of memes so that students do not get bored . Not that all this was categorically necessary for the organization of educational events, but if you have already begun to criticize education, then you need to take the matter seriously.
We went into all serious trouble: we invited guys from , eycharov, bosses from companies. The students did not leave us with questions and ideas.
At one of the lectures, we did not have enough chairs to arrange, we arranged additional ones, and they also ran out. We got dusty chairs from the warehouse and only then seated our two hundred people.
We beat our own records, tried to release two events a week. The three of us saw as many events as other guys participating in the HackClub program could not dream of. When we sent the first photos and numbers to the guy from the first team, he went nuts. It was really cool.
All of us were in shock. At the round table of heads of departments, the dean of our faculty accidentally found out that his third-year students gather more people at their reports than most teachers.
And everything was simple: we offered students technologies that can be used now to achieve results, to gain work experience. They showed different areas of IT so that the first-timers knew about the existence of the world outside the laboratory work in the C language. We connected to the program , broke through a small funding. Our listeners received accelerated access to ! We negotiated with the organizers of the conferences about discounts for students or passes for conferences (hello, SnowOne).
Now we make friends with all the universities of the city. We will hold security competitions and hackathons under the auspices of our Blurred Technologies. We want to finally invite large corporations to cooperate, and right now we are participating in the program .
For a very long time we could not find a permanent place of residence for our services. This limited us very much - some services needed high uptime, others needed a certain configuration. We tried different free plans, including for students. But either they still imposed restrictions on us, or the test period expired, and we wanted to continue further. Then they offered to help us. and allocated computing power to us and our students. It's great. It is really important for us that students can give free rein to their creativity without regard to restrictions.
We have our own view on the entire IT movement in the city. The hackathons we participated in were either idea juicers or hunt companies. We want to hold educational hackathons, with mentors, pizza and an amazing mood. We want to highlight the young and talented, and most importantly, help them gain confidence.
I often remember my current director, he is engaged in development. During his student years, he and a friend founded the company and made it the way they wanted it to be at 19 years old. They gathered in the dormitory of the academic campus, sawed various cool things. And now they work with one of the largest corporations in the world and make software for them, which is used by tens of thousands of employees.
Itβs just that the subjects that are taught at the university do not always have such a coherence that makes it possible to understand why they should be taught at all. Students torment a whole heap of textbooks every day, but the connection between subjects is not always obvious, or completely absent. Therefore, more often the effect of training is not as superb as it could be. What it should be. And it's not about bad teachers. There are very cool guys in education (hello, Bragilevsky Vitaly Nikolaevich, Moskvin Denis Nikolaevich, Romanov Evgeny Leonidovich and Mishchenko Polina Valerievna) - they strongly motivate to study further.
But the most important and worthwhile at the university will always be the community: people who live with you in the same dorm room or study with you in the same group.
Links to Blurred Education:
Vkontakte community -
My twitter -
P.S. Best Regards,
Source: habr.com