videos

ools, or at least not how to use them efficiently, and thus waste time and effort on tasks that should be simple. The standard CS curriculum is missing critical topics about the computing ecosystem that could make students’ lives significantly easier both during school and after graduation (most jobs do not formally teach these topics either). To help mitigate this, the three of us developed a class, originally called Hacker Tools in 2019 and then renamed to Missing Semester in 2020 (some great past discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22226380, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19078281). Over the past several years, we’ve seen the course translated into over a dozen languages, inspire similar courses at other universities, and be adopted by several companies as part of their standard onboarding materials. Based on feedback and discussions here and elsewhere, along with our updated perspective from working in industry for several years, we have developed a new iteration of the course. The 2026 edition covers several new topics such as packaging/shipping code, code quality, agentic coding, and soft skills. Some things never change, though; we’re still using this hacky Python DSL for editing our multi-camera-angle lecture videos: https://github.com/missing-semester/videos. As always, we’d love to hear any feedback from the community to help us improve the course content! —Anish, Jon, and Jose

s missing critical topics about the computing ecosystem that could make students’ lives significantly easier. To help mitigate this, we ran a short lecture series during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) that covered all the topics we consider crucial to be an effective computer scientist and programmer. We’ve published lecture notes and videos in the hopes that people outside MIT find these resources useful. To offer a bit of historical perspective on the class: we taught this class for the first time last year, when we called it “Hacker Tools” (there was some great discussion about last year’s class here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19078281). We found the feedback from here and elsewhere incredibly helpful. Taking that into account, we changed the lecture topics a bit, spent more lecture time on some of the core topics, wrote better exercises, and recorded high-quality lecture videos using a fancy lecture capture system (and this hacky DSL for editing multi-track lecture videos, which we thought some of you would find amusing: https://github.com/missing-semester/videos). We’d love to hear any insights or feedback you may have, so that we can run an even better class next year! -- Anish, Jose, and Jon