The Best Computer Science T-Shirts (Part 1)

I got tired. Tired of seeing stupid things on t-shirts that people wear around proudly.

"Just here to annoy you"

"I can hear you; I'm just not listening."

"Pizza is my valentine."

If I'm going to wear a graphic tee, I want it to reflect something I actually want to say. And I began to reward myself -- every time I finished a class or did something successfully (i.e. "It runs!"), I'd buy a t-shirt. This is how my collection got started. So I'm recommending some of the best computer science t-shirts in case you want to wear something more substantial than "Warning: I have issues" or "Everybody loves a Twinkie" (even if those things are true).

Also, a well-chosen graphic is a great conversation starter. If I'm in line at Wal-mart, it's so much better to chat about my favorite distro, rather than the usual banter about the meth lab that's under the parking lot. It only takes the right shirt to elevate the atmosphere a little.

The criteria for selecting a shirt is that it can't be too elementary, straightforward, or abstruse. For example, you may have seen this popular shirt that wouldn't make the list:

“There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.”

I have much better options for you. Most of these shirts are available in men's and women's sizes.

Subversion? Nah. SourceForge? Not for you. Let the world know about your preferred version control system.

So what if there's an emergency? Is it worth losing all your hard work? Save those changes before you save your life. Although I might question your judgment if you choose to push while under duress. In this case, your pull request might be the fire alarm. And when did you have time to merge or rebase? Maybe that was overlooked in the mayhem.

The changelogs might contain your final good-byes.

Avoid the magic numbers.

Aspiring pen tester? Give fair warning you're going to find those 777 permissions. After all, if you're allowed write and execute, then they deserve it, right? Though it's a tempting quick fix, everyone knows it's a bad idea.

Fiona Coulter wrote a great article for PHP developers about why giving your upload folders open permissions is a security risk (i.e. XSS and backdoor PHP files sitting in your folder and waiting for a permissions update). Try 775 or 755 instead, though the file will need to be owned by the webserver.

Though I can't imagine why, there's not a lot of fashion that is based on graph theory or combinatorics. And a whole proof might only fit on a shirt size 4XL. So I'd scoop up this recursion shirt while you can. Let everyone know that you use the run-time stack; after all, it might be slower than iteration, but recursion is useful for more than just Fibonacci numbers and sequences -- for example, traversing a tree data structure or as a sorting algorithm. Just don't forget to define your base case, or you risk a stack overflow.

Related: Towers of Hanoi and 8 Queens shirts are both on the market, as well.

You practice safe privilege escalation, and for your efforts, you deserve a pat on the back.

Ahhh . . . it's just so easy to run commands as root.

Based on probably the most recognizable xkcd computer science cartoon next to Bobby Tables, with this shirt you can proudly declare your love affair with Linux. You're a champion of open source. In fact, you love it so much, when you're not in terminal, you're using Cygwin.

You don't have to configure your /etc/sudoers file with visudo to enjoy the shirt.

With great power comes great responsibility.

Darn that preemptive scheduling.

Whether it's check-then-act or read-write-modify, resources don't have to be contentious. With this shirt, you can remind everyone to practice safe multithreading with locks. . . just be sure release the locks when you're done. Mutexes and semaphores are your friends. And in Java, you have concurrency tools: synchronized and executors.

I have not yet found a shirt on deadlock or starvation, so if you have a recommendation, please post as a comment.