git bisect/blame/revert/rebase/… become so much less useful when VC is treated as a chore and afterthought, and basically amounts to: “Feature is done, my work is complete, just do `git commit -am "changes"` and be done with it.”. And don’t get me started on commit messages.

It is shameful that for a large part of the industry, this is the norm. It is shameful that for a lot of professional, who call themselves software architects or reliability engineers and such fancy titles, still have essentially no idea what they are doing with git, and their response when git add/commit/push/pull don’t work is to shrug, and just delete and re-clone the repo.

Version control should be treated with care and attention to detail. It pays for itself 100 times over.

If your commit history is maintained and tells a story, it is a joy to review your PR. If you just `git commit -am "try fix"` 26 times over, and all that is left in the end is a ball of mud, it is horrible.

I think this is fine and if anything you should give it more space. It doesn't replace foundational understanding, but the course is explicitly about "practical" aspects, we can assume said foundational understanding is developed in other courses.

Something like "build your own agent" would be a great intuition pump. The model is doing the heavy lifting and a basic harness is a couple hundred lines of simple code. It could fit in a single lecture and it would be very high signal in my opinion.

You don't appreciate it when you're studying, because obviously it sounds a bit soft. But when you're learning how something works, often the thing that stops you isn't the fundamentals, which you know what are, it's the little frustrations like not knowing how to commit or pull code, or not knowing how to navigate the terminal.

This time would be much better spent watching these 9h of lectures.

- first of all, you need to know how to manage your own digital information. Even though it's taken for granted that a CS/CE freshman knows this, well, in my experience, that's usually not the case also for many PhD... Information management isn't just a taxonomy of files and dirs; it's also about evaluating, for example, what happens if the software you use for your notes is discontinued, or if your photo gallery disappears, and so on, and acting accordingly knowing your SPOFs and how to mitigate them;

- then you need to know how to write, in the broadest sense, which includes mathematical notation, generating graphs, "freehand" drawing like simple CAD, and formatting your work for various purposes and media, whether it's emails, theses, reports, or general messages. This is where teaching LaTeX, org-mode, R/Quarto, etc comes in. It's not "advanced" is the very basic. Before learning to program and no, Office suites are not an answer, they are monsters from a past era, made to makes untrained human with little culture to use a computer for basic stuff instead of typewriters, a student is not that;

- you need to know how to crunch numbers. Basic statistics are useful, but they're largely stuck in another era. You need to know how to do math on a computer, symbolic computation, whether it's Maxima or SymPy, doesn't really matter, and statistical processing basis. For instance, knowing Polars/Plotly/* at a minimum level are basic skills a freshman should have at a software/operational level, because they should be working in these environments from day one, given that these are the epistemological tools of the present, not paper anymore.

Then you also need to manage code, but in the broadest sense. A dSCM is also for managing your own notes and documents, not just software, and you need to know how to share these with others, whether it's Radicle or Forgejo or patches vua mail doesn't really matter, but this family of software needs to be introduced and used at least at a basic level. A DynDNS services should be also given so anyone could try to self-host the services they want.

Knowing how to communicate is an essential skill, and it's not about using Gmail or Zoom... it's about learning how to self-host basic communication services. It doesn't really matter if it's XMPP, Matrix, or Nostr, but the concept must be clear, and understanding the distributed and decentralized options we have today is vital. A student needs to learn how to stand on their own two feet, not on someone else's servers.

These are basic IT skills that aren't "advanced" at all, despite what many people think, or "sysadmin-level" and so on; they're simply what a freshman should have as someone who loves knowledge and wants to get their hands dirty.