Mad, Beautiful Ideas
Becoming a Better Developer: Reading Papers

If I think undergraduate education, across pretty much all fields but I'm going to focus on Computer Science, is really lacking, it's that undergraduates don't read research papers. I'm sure some programs are different, but Catherine didn't read any until she was in her last year of her undergrad, and that might have been related to the course being offered as graduate credit more than anything. I'm sure I was never assigned any to read, though I did from time to time.

Computer Science is unique in this respect for two reasons: there is as much, if not more, research going on in corporate research groups as in academia; but also because so many of the journals in our field are open access, so we can get access to the materials without paying.

Periodically, I've made an effort to read a paper a week. I'm planning on returning to that, and I think I'll post a summary of my thoughts each week, as I did last week. With that in mind, next week's paper is going to be Twitter Under Crisis: Can we trust what we RT?, so if you want to read and discuss it, then I'll be glad to engage in the discussion.