Solving the MIT Missing Semester Exercises
Hey there!
I recently worked through MIT’s Missing Semester of Your CS Education — a course built around a simple idea: universities teach you algorithms and data structures, but rarely teach you the tools that actually make you productive as a developer. I’m documenting what I solved and picked up here.
Why I picked this up
Most of my coursework has focused on building things — apps, servers, dissertation code. This course is different: it’s about how you build, not what you build. That gap was showing up in small ways — messy shell one-liners, sloppy Git history, no real debugging workflow.
What I worked through
- Course Overview + Shell — got properly comfortable with pipes, redirection, and shell scripting instead of copy-pasting commands I didn’t fully understand.
- Command-line Environment — job control, terminal multiplexing, and aliases that now live permanently in my
.bashrc. - Development Environment and Tools — editor setup, plugins, and treating my terminal as a real workspace instead of a place I panic in.
- Debugging and Profiling — using actual debuggers and profilers instead of
print()statements everywhere. - Version Control and Git — going past
add,commit,pushinto rebasing, bisecting, and actually reading a commit graph. - Packaging and Shipping Code — dependency management and getting code from “works on my machine” to something deployable.
- Code Quality — linting, testing habits, and writing code for the next person reading it (usually future me).
What actually changed
The shell and Git exercises had the biggest payoff. I already manage a few services on my own Ubuntu VPS, and being sloppy with the terminal there is how you break production at 1am. Cleaner Git habits have also made it easier to go back through my own project history without wincing.
If you’re a CS student and nobody has shown you this course yet — do it before your next project, not after.
Happy hacking! 🚀