I'd agree with you if you were talking about generic "commieblock" buildings, but the ones presented in this article are pretty original and have a monumental feel to them. Pretty sad to see your sentiment upvoted this high on HN.
Lol, no that is actually a mugshot of my ugly face. I swear. And the post is legit. I really did not graduate high school because back in 1999, the internet was exciting and school books were just a waste of my time. And then I got my first job as a web developer, building Flash websites. Exciting times.
If you want to work in a more academic area such as Machine Learning it would be helpful. For something like frontend development it would not be very useful.
Even if someone is going to do front-end development, Western countries' immigration authorities typically award a big boost in points for graduate degrees in critical fields (e.g., frequently CS).
I can read datasheets perfectly well, and Arduino seems pretty good by the low standards of microprocessor programming tooling.
I mean, you can program in C rather than assembly language! And you don't have to pay £300 a seat for the compiler! It works on windows, linux and mac instead of being windows-only! If you open source your project, other people can contribute and they don't even need a £150 tool to download the program to the chip! Other people can compile your code and have it work without needing to know the details of 'linker scripts' and 'codesourcery toolchains' and all that stuff!
Maybe, but this (often buggy) closed source stuff and not having a proper data sheet causes a lot of trouble for projects creating these nice firmwares (micropython, nodemcu, …) which people tend to use.
That's a really good book, indeed. Cliff in the book is much less annoying than Cliff in real life, though. I didn't expect him to be such a conservative anti-technology person. A good example is this[1] newspaper article of his. At times, he just seems like a typical attention-seeking contrarian.
He wrote some other books about that. Most of the points he gives are pretty reasonable (tech isn't a panacea, tech for its own sake in an professional/educational environment is bad, PowerPoint is the devil (that's actually true)), but I still wouldn't invite him over for dinner.
