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bolido_sentimental  1yr ago (text post)   4133 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 25, 2022

Merry Christmas, everyone!

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it's more fun to write things from scratch

All fun and games until it isn't.

I don't mean to be insulting, but this is a very naive sentiment to hold. Real-world software (ones that people use) can use more than 20 different libraries, all of which are wildly different in functionality and are difficult to implement for people working in that specific field, forget people not in that field.

You are not going to write a web API, a database or a transformer model from scratch. But you can write software that interfaces with libraries/APIs that allows you to use 3 of those things in the same codebase, in a reasonable amount of time.

I'm completely fine with the math background being wasted.

How bad is your health?

Generic software engineering is boring. Way more boring for someone who got a math Ph.D., than you can imagine, it's grunt work most of the time. The math equivalent to being made to solve quadratic equations and do algebra all day, just 100s of problems of them.

No offense taken. I took up Project Euler two years ago, when grad school felt unbearable between some personal issues, Covid fanaticism, Zoom-based teaching, and figuring out that I wasn't good enough for number theory. (The last was always a possibility, it was just an extra layer of suck on top of the others). So I optimized for enjoyment. In fairness, the PhD program was for enjoyment to begin with - I'd gone into the master's with the goal of teaching community college and ended up liking pure math way too much. Now it's time to grow up.

Screwed lower back and pretty much all arm/hand joints. Chronic pain, now mostly manageable with NSAIDs and very light barbell squats.

Tedious work toward (hopefully) a useful goal for a non-woke employer will be a massive quality of life improvement.

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