Dev Degree Blog

Author: Jean-Michel Lemieux CTO, Shopify When I decided to study computer science at university, my parents were skeptical. They didn’t know anyone who had chosen this as a career. Computer science was, and still is, in its infancy. Software development isn’t pure science or pure engineering — it’s a combination of the two, mixed with a remarkable amount of artistic flare. It's a profession where you grow by learning the theory and then doing. A lot of doing. It’s a profession that’s increasingly in demand. And it’s a profession so new that schools are still learning how to teach it. The supply isn’t matching the demand; not even close.Our industry is fraught with critical shortages of skills and diversity — software developers are more...

Author: Fedor Lisovskiy As a kid I didn’t like snakes all that much. They’re cold, slippery, and have a good chance of posing a terminal inconvenience to whomever ventures near. Which makes it all the more surprising that I did a fair amount of snake wrangling in my childhood. Of course, I’m not talking about herpetology’s raison d'être. No, I am talking about Python, “the world’s most powerful programming language that you can still read”, which happened to be my introduction to the world of programming. I was born in Moscow near the turn of the millennium, around the time when people were starting to seriously question the use of two-digit codes to represent four-digit years. I don’t remember much...

Author: Adrianna Chang The world of software development was entirely unknown to me when I entered high school. I had big plans to pursue film production post-graduation and had already picked out the university I wanted to attend. At the end of grade 10, my parents encouraged me to sign up for an introductory Computer Science (CS) course for the following year. Both of them are in tech, and they believed that I might enjoy it as well. However, I was resistant to give it a try. I thought that programming sounded a bit dull and none of my friends were taking it. Besides – I already knew what I wanted to do after high school, right? After some persuasion, I...