misterpurple45

The author isn’t comparing apples with apples.

“Butterfly valve” is the name for a type of widget.

There are many instances of “butterfly valve”, some of which will have strange brand names.

Just like there are many “web frameworks”, each with weird and wonderful names (“Django”, “Rails”, “Spring” etc.)

We’re really not that different.

I think you mean empathetic, rather than emphatic.

I see this “AWS for everything” Well-Architected stuff everywhere. AWS benefits greatly from inserting itself in between all our architectural layers.

There’s nothing stopping companies from using the cloud for its primitives (compute and storage), maybe with managed FOSS services (RDS Postgres). We don’t _need_ to go all in on AWS to build a ‘modern’ web application. Yet somehow much of the industry dances to AWS’ tune on how to architect software.

Humans hugely undervalue their time. £12.50 per day is a bargain for a tradesperson if it means they can do more work because they’re spending less time idling in traffic jams.

Behavioural change is a key part of these schemes. Kids walking to school, families getting groceries delivered, or picking up groceries by foot on the walk home from the bus are all viable low-cost options in London.

The train companies operate trains, not lines. For example; CrossCountry’s service runs on track shared with other passenger companies and freight from Penzance up to Scotland.

This is my experience as an adult studying calculus, linear algebra, dynamic programming etc.

Calculus is mostly algebra. If you can’t reliably solve algebraic equations, derivatives and integrals will probably be a step too far.

Algebra is mostly arithmetic. If you can’t reliably add and multiply rational numbers, solving for unknowns is going to be patchy at best.

The key part as a student is learning to recognise when I needed to re-tread the primitive operations. Having to go back and practice the mental arithmetic I first learned in primary school was a hit to the ego, but at least I could recognise and take that step. When I was in my late teens / early 20s I was much less able to swallow my pride and back-track.

I want to verify for myself that I _know_ the material. A series of challenging exams will do that more thoroughly than completing exercises from a textbook or online course (where, let’s be honest, we’re more forgiving of ourselves than we should be).

Check out Barbara Oakley’s Coursera course called Learning How To Learn. It turns out exams are actually an excellent tool for learning, more so than learning without assessment.

A side effect has been that having a deadline and a measurable outcome has been incredibly motivating. I’d have probably been distracted by side projects if I hadn’t committed to the exams.

And yes, it’s accepted for uni entrance here. STEM courses at top unis will expect A-level grades in maths/science subjects, even for mature students with industry experience.

I’m in a very similar position. I didn’t go to uni and somehow found myself in a programming career. In a few weeks I’ll be sitting A-level (UK advanced high school) Mathematics exams for the same reasons as you. I’m 32 years old.

I’ve found having formal exams to study for very motivating, and humbling. I thought I knew things I’d read in books, but it turns out I just recognised them when I came across the same topic again. Being able to recall concepts and use them without help under time pressure is a different level of mastery.

Can you sit high school exams as an adult in the US? There might be private exam centres in a city. That way you’ll _know_ you’ve learned the math(s) you need, on top of all the great learning resources linked here.

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Edit: Cambridge International do A-level exams, with centres accepting private candidates globally: https://www.cambridgeinternational.org/programmes-and-qualif...

> The code makers have been ahead since about the 1970s.

Or so the code breakers would have us believe…

I was with this post until the author mentioned a /utils or /helpers directory, which made me sad.

No piece of code is so bland that it can’t be placed somewhere with a name that describes what it does or what category it belongs to.

Lawyers aren’t the users here.

The users of law are normal people and companies that need to transact with untrusted parties.

Well-paid lawyers clinging to Microsoft Word are a cost centre to most businesses, much of which could likely be automated.

This isn’t necessarily a threat to the legal profession. See the history of accountants and spreadsheet software.

I’ve always wondered if contracts themselves couldn’t be expressed in a parsable domain-specific language.

IANAL, but it seems to me that source code and contracts/legislation/policies are similar in many ways: logic, rules, special words with reserved meaning.

The right DSL might go a long way to automating the boring stuff out of law, and serve to highlight the contentious stuff for human judgement.

This is very seductive, but what happens when I need to refactor the database? Do all my API consumers just have to deal with a new interface?

We use currying at work to inject dependencies. E.g.

`sendEmail(mockEmailService)(to, subject, body) `

I find it helps to differentiate between side-effecting dependencies and parameters, making code purer, easier to test, more scalable etc.

And the is-odd package.json requires is-number! Jesus...