David Malan

So much so I had this existential crisis thinking maybe I should have gone to a PhD in archaeology instead.

But I stayed with CS.

And I just wish someone had told me to calm down early on and sort of explore more, particularly areas in which I thought I'd be less comfortable.

And that's at least a message I try to give to students nowadays.

As for professional regrets, thankfully, relatively few come to mind.

If anything, I used to joke, even with some of our own TAs, that insofar as

I've largely stayed in academia.

I've never had a real job, but as recently as a recent sabbatical, I spent a whole semester essentially interning with GitHub as a professor in residence and learning the ropes of a real world software engineering company and having access to the internal issues and bug reports and feature requests and sitting in as a fly on the wall to some of the team meetings and design chats.

And it was so much fun to actually live the life that we've been teaching about for so long.

And there too, I wish I had done that earlier or at least in parallel, had done maybe more consulting opportunities or done a little bit more in the real world before coming back to school and then staying in school.

Did you ship a project or what was that time at GitHub like?

It wasn't, I don't think I contributed code.

I definitely contributed issues and bug reports and feature requests.

My sort of role was to be this educational voice at the table, especially in the design of certain products and to at least speak up on behalf of educational use cases, give teachers a voice at the table when it comes to

certain features that would really make the student experience better, particularly in tools like VS Code, albeit on the Microsoft side or some of the internal GitHub tooling.

So I don't think you'll find any code that I wrote, but hopefully one of my issues underlies some code that's now in the code base.

I think it's been very meaningful, so much so that it's become our mission organically to have this now tradition of open courseware that wasn't certainly our own idea.

It was really inspired by our friends down the road at MIT who really championed this decades ago.

But very happy with how that has evolved because it's made the work all the more meaningful in ways that go beyond just education, but helping, as we've heard anecdotally from some of our students out there, very professional impacts, life impacts, being able to better care for your family or to pivot professionally into a field that you didn't think was for you.

Like that has just been very meaningful and rather makes it all worthwhile.