The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

Classes teach you all about advanced topics within CS, from operating systems to machine learning, but there’s one critical subject that’s rarely covered, and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with their tools. We’ll teach you how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more!

Students spend hundreds of hours using these tools over the course of their education (and thousands over their career), so it makes sense to make the experience as fluid and frictionless as possible. Mastering these tools not only enables you to spend less time on figuring out how to bend your tools to your will, but it also lets you solve problems that would previously seem impossibly complex.

These days, many aspects of software engineering are also in flux through the introduction of AI-enabled and AI-enhanced tools and workflows. When used appropriately and with awareness of their shortcomings, these can often provide significant benefits to CS practitioners and are thus worth developing working knowledge of. Since AI is a cross-functional enabling technology, there is not a standalone AI lecture; we’ve instead folded the use of the latest applicable AI tools and techniques into each lecture directly.

Syllabus

• Course Overview + Introduction to the Shell
• Command-line Environment
• Development Environment and Tools
• Debugging and Profiling
• Version Control and Git
• Packaging and Shipping Code
• Agentic Coding
• Beyond the Code
• Code Quality