Education

For this episode, I visited the PORTAL building at UNC Charlotte to sit down with Dr. Mohamed Shehab—a professor whose mobile development course keeps showing up in conversations with students as one of the most impactful experiences of their degree. I’ve heard it repeatedly from students I’ve hired: “Dr. Shehab’s course changed how I think about building software.” When you hear that kind of feedback consistently, you have to ask what he’s doing differently. ...

Back in November, I was preparing for the Cracking the Cloud presentation at UNC Charlotte. I needed a way to explain how the cloud fundamentally changed what’s possible on the internet—not through abstract concepts, but through something students could immediately relate to. That’s when I remembered Thomas Game Docs. If you’ve never heard of her: she’s a YouTuber who makes incredibly well-produced video essays about video games. And she sometimes runs surveys asking her audience things like “Who’s the LEAST popular Pokémon?” or “Who’s the LEAST popular Animal Crossing villager?” ...

I was invited to speak at UNC Charlotte recently to the computer science programs, and I approached the session, Cracking the Cloud, with a very specific goal: to give students a realistic, actionable way to stand out in a job market that’s becoming more competitive every year. Companies are slowing early-career hiring. AI is reshaping workflows. Expectations for junior talent are rising, not shrinking. Students can sense this shift, but many don’t know what to do with that reality. That’s where the conversation begins. ...