Firstly an announcement: as of June 2020 (6 months from now) all Bradfield classes will be conducted online via Zoom, instead of our physical location in San Francisco. I was deeply skeptical of online instruction for most of Bradfield’s existence. If you had asked me a couple of years ago…

Of the 100,000 or so new software engineers entering the industry this year in the US, only a small fraction will have graduated from CS programs at top schools. Despite an unprecedented surge in demand, last year Berkeley was only able to award 943 undergraduate degrees in computer science across…

What is everybody working on? — Last week we kicked off our sabbatical program, a free self-directed computer science study program. It’s been exciting to see participants come with a wide range of backgrounds and goals, and bond over a shared desire to dig deeper into CS and software engineering. This post is a quick summary…

Software engineers go crazy for the most ridiculous things. We like to think that we’re hyper-rational, but when we have to choose a technology, we end up in a kind of frenzy — bouncing from one person’s Hacker News comment to another’s blog post until, in a stupor, we float…

If education is about three things, it is about information, curation and motivation. When it comes to computer science, the Internet has dramatically increased the amount of available information, but has barely helped with curation and arguably done more harm than good for motivation 😀. We can’t do much about…

Unfortunately, most self-taught software engineers have a poor grasp of the fundamentals of database systems. …

In my first few days as a freshman, I met a classmate who claimed that he could code in any programming language I could name. Astonished, I challenged “what about that unreadable esoteric language where the handful of commands merely simulate a Turing machine!?” …

There is a special breed of engineer who reserves their greatest esteem for dusty old workhorse systems: those operating systems and networking protocols and museum piece hardware systems designed decades ago that typically go unseen and unloved. Whether or not you count yourself as one of this strange group of…

One of the biggest knowledge deficits we see among self-taught engineers and bootcamp graduates is in the area of computer architecture. …