Having surveyed a good number of this year's fourth year projects, I'm led to wonder where we see ourselves with respect to Applied Software Engineering. There were many projects based around Apps, with purposes that were, frankly ill-contrived. The students duly researched and hooked up the various bits of technology required, MySQL and Javascript and Ruby all over the place. Good for them. But surely our business as computer scientists is not writing Apps, but writing applications that make Apps. We have other businesses to attend to, for sure. But the creation of computational means of meeting human needs should be an important goal.
