Foreword

Hi, my name is Ethan Richards, and at the time of writing, I’m a senior in Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines. I’m working on finishing up my undergraduate degree and will graduate with that in May 2025. I am also pursuing my masters and will graduate with that degree in December 2025.

I’ll make this foreword brief and answer the questions that you’re probably asking: What gives me the qualifications to write a book about computer science and software engineering? What is even the point of this book?

I think I’m a fairly well respected figure, at least in the CS@Mines circles. My college career has had a special emphasis on CS education; I helped design our introductory CS course, CSCI128, helped with our Systems Programming course, CSCI210, and got my research published at SIGCSE 2024. My masters project is designing a UI/UX course for the department. I’ve been a lead TA for 128 since its inception. I was also president of Mines ACM for a year and I had various involvement with other roles for about 3 years. I also helped organize the Mines High School Programming Competition for two years.

Outside of academia, I started programming when I was in middle school, fascinated by how I could use Java to modify Minecraft. I have had one internship and another for my dad’s company, if you want to count that, with another lined up for Summer 2025.

Of course, all of this does not make me an expert by any means, and I still have a lot to learn and experience (and I hope that’s the most you ever hear me brag). The purpose of this text is to share that helped me along my journey in CS so far and what helped me succeed up to this point in industry and academia.

This is also a great reflective process for me now that I’m wrapping up college; I want to reflect on the great people and lessons that I learned. I’ll talk about my understanding of things in the realm of computer science and software engineering, understanding the people in the field, and how we can all succeed both individually and together. Enjoy!

The full book can be downloaded as a PDF here.