Over the years, the three of us helped teach several classes at MIT, and over and over again we saw that students had limited knowledge of tools available to them. Computers were built to automate manual tasks, yet students often perform repetitive tasks by hand or fail to take full advantage of powerful tools such as version control and IDEs. Common examples include manually renaming a symbol across many source code files, or using the nuclear approach to fix a Git repository (https://xkcd.com/1597/).
At least at MIT, these topics are not taught as part of the university curriculum: students are never shown how to use these tools, 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
