About 20 years ago I failed out of the undergrad CS program at UIUC because I thought I was smart enough to skip most lectures. I did manage to get an A in the C++ Data Structures course because the lectures were recorded and I just binged them all the night before each test.
Anyways, now I’m a full-time lecturer teaching undergraduate CS courses (long story) and I’m actually shaping curriculum. As soon as I read this article I thought “I need to tell my data structures students to read this” because it echoes a lot of what I’ve been saying in class.
Case in point: right after two lectures covering the ArrayList versus LinkedList implementations of the Java List interface, I spent an entire lecture on JUnit and live-coded a performance test suite that produced actual data to back up our discussions of big-O complexity. The best part of all? They learned about JIT compilation in the JVM firsthand because it completely blew apart the expected test results.