The series I wish I'd made | Fish Percolator

I wanted to do an engaging series with an intro to computer science. But someone beat me to it.

I’m a relic.

I studied computer science at university 25 years ago. As a nerdy & neurodivergent kid, like many others, I always knew I wanted to be a software engineer.

But these days brightest and best in the engineering discipline don’t only come to us from a theoretical background. Many people have been trained in a whole different field, had a whole different career before they make their way here.

And the most common route to get into the profession as a career-changer is through a boot camp or maybe an apprenticeship. This is great because it means people don’t have to go back and study a whole degree just to get access to the profession, and it stops us being a homogeneous group of people with the same life experiences as each other.

One consequence of this is that people often skip over the theory and make their way right to the practice. This sometimes means people can really excel at building tech without really understanding how the tech works below the surface.

As people get more and more senior in their profession, this can become more and more apparent as the problems get harder, more low-level and more theoretical.

Getting familiar with the theory

So, I had this idea. A funny, engaging and bite-size YouTube series that explains the basics of computer science, divided into nice short videos so you could dip into the topic you actually needed.

When you have an idea, it always pays to look to see if someone else has beaten you to your idea. And, well, someone had!

That someone is British computer science educator Carrie Anne Philbin MBE. Together with American public broadcaster PBS, she has created this incredible series that genuinely is more depth than you’d learn in your whole first year of a computer science degree, all in 40 videos of 10-15 minutes each.

If you’re reading this just before the Christmas holidays, maybe this is something to watch during that time, when you get sick of the Eastenders Christmas special or the King’s Speech (sorry Charles; maybe if you learnt some tips from Carrie Anne!)

Here’s her introduction to the course:

And here’s a link to the whole course. It’s all free on YouTube and it’s honestly better than I can imagine most paid courses on this subject would be.

Carrie Anne hasn’t paid me for this. She doesn’t even know who I am. I’m just a huge fan of her work here and so glad she did this before I did because hers is way better than mine would have been!

My highlights

There are some things in this course in particular that I think all software engineers without a theoretical background could really benefit from watching.

Whenever I talk about the “OSI 7-layer model” I regularly receive a glazed look, but actually understanding the layers that make up a computer network is super fascinating and makes the internet seem way less mysterious.

The two videos on this topic are:

Or there’s the video on what operating systems are and how they came to be:

Or how she somehow manages to explain cryptography (including public-key cryptography that underpins much modern security like SSL) in twelve and a half minutes! I’m sure this took about 10 weeks when I was university:

And (bear in mind this is 8 years ago) here’s one on the fundamental maths that explains how AIs work:

As I write this I realise they’re all my favourite. And I think everyone in the industry, not only mid-level software engineers, will find things in here that they enjoy and that demystify the theory of what can sometimes be quite a scary topic to even know where to start learning.

My blog post today isn’t an advert for my services or me showing off what I know. It’s just me being thankful to Carrie Anne for being so incredible at explaining computer science and my Christmas gift to you is that now you get to experience it too!

Watch Carrie Anne Philbin - Crash Course: Computer Science

Fish Percolator is a technical leadership consultancy based in Yorkshire.

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