This Friday: Computer Science as a Profession

This Friday I’ll be giving a talk to 250 primarily first-year students majoring in Computer Science at Michigan State University. This presentation is part of their CSE 100: Computer Science as a Profession course that students are required to take.

I’m planning on starting with an overview of Mozilla and some of the unique technical challenges that I’ve had to solve. One of the really cool things about working at Mozilla is getting to see and experience up front the wide spectrum of computing problems that are being tackled.

Within the Mozilla community, there are people working on the forefront of research by implementing a new memory-safe and concurrent programming language (Rust) and parallel browser engine (Servo) to finding innovative ways to get people more involved with producing web content (Webmaker).

I will try to record the presentation, but I can’t make any guarantees.

I feel very honored to receive an invitation to give this talk, and I’m greatly looking forward to it. If you have some helpful tips for college freshman, please do share in the comments below.