My java

I recently finished a four week online course called “introduction to java” to get some more grip on my programming skills.

The course was provided by the Hasso-Plattner institute of the University of Potsdam, which offers open courses free of charge from time to time. Some in German, some in English and even a few Chinese ones.

Except from some performance issues at the beginning everything went pretty fine. The course itself consisted of video tutorials, followed by quizzes and some smaller programming tasks to be done in their own IDE, which had some unit tests already integrated. At the end of each week there was an extra task, which was not checked by unit tests, but by the teacher (or their assistants, or whomever, at least by humans). And to be honest this end of week tasks were what I liked most since they were about finding errors in a given piece of code. I’d say you’ll have to invest about 8-10 hours a week for the course if you attend thoroughly.

Will this course make me a programmer? Probably not, and I don’t really intend to be one. But the course helped me tremendously in understanding the developers better and getting a better understanding of where some bugs might be hiding from a code point of view. Overall, HPI did a good job and their MOOC – Massive Open Online Courses prooved their ground (you could argue about the name, but that is a topic of its’ own).

PS: In case you should wonder, that road sign and the town of Myjava are located in Slovakia. I just had to stop and take that picture when I drove along that sign.