You're welcome Bay Farm School Students

My wife is a substitute teacher in the Alameda Unified School District (AUSD). Her personalized license plate for her car is:

One of the schools where she teaches is Bay Farm School. It's the school that both of our children attended. As such, we have a past and current affection for the school. So when 6^th grade teacher, Lori Oducayen, asked me to come talk to her coding class about what it's like to have a job as a computer programmer, I was happy to oblige. Ms. Oducayen sent me the students' questions in advance. Basically I answered their questions by telling the class:

• The amount of money you earn as a programmer depends on your grades. Employers have to offer people who make good grades more money because students with good grades get more job offers, and Autodesk has to make its job offer the most attractive to get the students who work the hardest to come to work for Autodesk.

• Not everyone at Autodesk is a coder. There are architects and engineers who define what our programs should do, quality assurance engineers who test the programs, marketing and sales who sell the programs, and human resources/legal employees who help the programmers.

• Programmers have to learn existing code, write documents that describe how they will change the code, write their code, test their code, and review others' code.

• Good code is correct, readable, efficient, and reusable.

• To be a good programmer, you need to know:

  • Teamwork
  • Math and/or music
  • Programming languages

• In the future, many jobs will involve some coding. So don't ask yourself "Do I want to be a programmer when I grow up?" Instead, ask yourself: "What problem do I want to solve?"

I have been on vacation for the last two weeks. This week when I got back to the office, I had an envelope in my in-box that contained thank you cards from the Ms. Oducayen and her students. Here are the cards by the Mercedes-Benz Biome Car exhibit in the Autodesk Gallery.

Here are just a few excerpts of the students' comments:

• "I really didn't see coding as the correct path for me, because I didn't have a great passion for it. But now I do."
  Dominic

• "Thank you for wasting some of your time to teach us what Autodesk is. I really learned a lot from you like Autodesk makes tools that help people improve, and that Autodesk pays depending on your grades."
  Katrina
  (Editor's note: I know what Katrina really meant.)

• "You were very helpful about the salary, and you inspired me to try to pursue a career in coding after you talked about 3D printing."
  Roger

• "After this experience, I learned that teamwork is key in coding, and that coding is a great life choice."
  Irvin

• "I really took it personally when you said we couldn't accomplish coding without teamwork."
  Ryan

• "I found the part about music being helpful interesting."
  Mia

• "You really inspired me to be a computer programmer when you said there was computer programming in every field."
  Sofia

• "In the future I will try to do programming when I grow up and get good grades."
  Roslyn

• "I remember when you told us that we should think about what problem we will solve. This got me thinking."
  /*
  * @param args
  */
  public static void main (string[] args) {
   // TO DO Auto-generated method stub
   System.out.println ("Sincerely, Quinlan:);
  }
  Quinlan

I was honored to be able to help shape young minds. Hey Ms. Oducayen and Bay Farm students, you are very welcome.

Education is alive in the lab.