You're struggling to grasp hands-on learning in computer engineering. Which strategies will help you succeed?

Few thoughts on this question - Follow through the lab material or demo available online if it is common hardware - if uncommon, seek consultation through work Network or buddy assigned - one of the best learning is through trial and error when that luxury is available. It's perfectly okay to make mistakes for the first few times and certainly showcase learnings and growth. Better if there is a simulator available to keep the cost of mistakes low.

The concept of active practice can be applied to any task that involves learning and improving a skill. It doesn't matter if it's sports, music, academics or work. Getting hands-on to work with simple projects and progressively increasing the difficulty and exploring more complex concepts and ideas is essential for growth. It doesn't matter if a project seems “very simple” or “very basic” to us. Even from these mini-tasks key concepts that we believe we have understood 100% only from theory can be strengthen. A solid foundation creates a better path forward.

The biggest thing I had to overcome: Thinking that I understood something when I did not. It is time to understand you are learning something new. You are encountering things that you have not experienced before. Do not rely on past knowledge. Check your understanding with seasoned people you are working with. That is what they are there for. If they only like to put you down, or are unhelpful - look for a new situation QUICKLY.

Typically, people will help you if you are kind, genuinely kind. This is the #1 way to be accepted, and to be trusted by your team. Your suggestions will carry weight. As you become a leader, people will give their best because they do not want to disappoint you. Powerful!

Programming and engineering are extremely broad fields of knowledge. It is impossible to acquire all learning from a single source. And the lessons gained through collaboration are invaluable. Not only in joint projects, sharing experiences (both successes and failures), different points of view and work methodologies, being part of an online community are unique ways to enrich yourself as a professional and as a person.

Seek authoratative sites. Those maintained by the language reference committee, the author of the language, or vendor sites from competitive, successful vendors. As you spend time in the industry, you will become acquainted with who the best instructors are. For instructors, members of a language standard committee are a good place to start.

Debugging a problem starts with.. first understanding the concepts and then functioning and use case . the most helpful path is to do piecewise debugging . this involved development of easy to run sw code that is very clear to understand and then step by step gets complex and reproduce the issue.

This is one of the most misunderstood areas of design. One needs to understand how a device is supposed to work of course. But we commonly only test to the spec. This does not effectively find the big bugs that your customers will find. Thinking and testing outside the box will find more device and system level bugs than not. Do things out of order. Look for ways to negative test. Then look at those results. Failure of operation can be ok in this scenario but the device/system should be able to recover. If it hangs hard and requires a power cycle should it have? Finally always ask yourself after a test completes if it passed or failed, should it have? Never settle for preconceived notions. Question everything

One of the larger issues I started to see in the last 10ish years is that the colleges are no longer stressing that digital logic is still built with analog devices. Yes in simulation we treat everything as 1s and 0s, but I can promise you that’s not what’s going on inside the device. Ensuring that you have good power and ground channels is imperative. Understanding how substrate works and how analogy device can feed into the digital or vice versa and structuring your design accordingly will save you in the long run