Alumni Interview – Victor Emmanuel Hanopol

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Where are you working now?

I’m working at Credential Financial, Inc. (in Vancouver, CA) as a QA Analyst II. We are predominantly using Microsoft-based technologies for development and software testing, like Visual Studio Ultimate 2010, and Sharepoint 2010 which are used in bug tracking and automated testing.

How did the Ateneo education prepare you for your work?

Ateneo’s aim to create a well-rounded person really helped me in my work. As one needs the academic training to handle the technological and business aspects of work, Non-academic and/or /inter-personal skills help me to deal with different kinds of people. The Ateneo also gave me the ability and confidence to lead when needed.

What advice you’d give to our students today?

My advice to students is to always have an open-minded view… This will help them to learn new things/new technologies… on new processes, and to not settle with just one way of doing things… and to never stop learning.

Well said. Thank you.

Victor Emmanuel Hanopol is a CS Division Alumnus and also a former Instructor and Program Coordinator of the Division.

Should computer programming be on par with reading and writing?

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Here’s a somewhat controversial article from ReadWriteWeb: a proposal to make computer literacy as important as basic literacy. From the article:

Everyone ought to be able to read and write; few people within the global mainstream would argue with that statement. But should everyone be able to program computers? The question is becoming critically important as digital technology plays an ever more central role in daily life. The movement to make code literacy a basic tenet of education is gaining momentum, and its success or failure will have a huge impact on our society.

via Computer Programming for All: A New Standard of Literacy.

My take on this: yes, but…it can’t (and probably shouldn’t) be done with programming languages as they exist today. The state of the art presents too many non-programming-related cruft in front of the user, whereas the actual meat — the algorithms, the analysis — gets lost and diluted.