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I feel that I've missed something nice here. I'll have to read more.

> It's an Asperger profession; smart but artless.

No worse than any other profession. Sure, most days I do more of the same, build reports for finance/corporate problems. It's rolling stones up a hill every morning, but that has nothing to do with programming itself. The issue you're describing is that you're working to haul someone else's stones. Fine, all well and good, pay is good. Wouldn't be any different if I was a musician or a painter... all they ever request is that I play Piano Man.

For me the art comes in doing it a different way each time. Maybe it's a function of my inexperience, I've only been doing this for a few years so far but the horizon seems so far away and there's so much to learn that I can't imagine getting bored anytime soon. Everything is amazing and I can't learn it all! In the meanwhile there's stuff to learn outside of tech. Like gardening or baking. Baking bread is a series of simple tricks (temperature of the yeast, bowl type, kneading techniques, etc.) that people do in order to produce an outcome (a certain crust or flavour). I'm struck often by how similar I find it to writing code.

Try rolling the stone with one hand tied behind your back.

Is that also a pun?

I can appreciate the sentiment. Though in this context I'd consider it to almost be a satire. ie. Real men don't think about the kinds of things that other people who say "real men __" because they're busy building things.

That’s apples to oranges. Would you hire a programmer who hadn’t gone to University?

People are also having less children which lessens the pressure to exit the city.

Meat is a luxury.

I’m in the industry, everyone here uses spreadsheets for everything. They only have us working on other stuff now because we’re reaching memory limits and row limits for calculations.

But primarily we have a few factors working in excels favor. 1. Inertia. 2. Difficulty in switching to a more advanced solution for non-technical folks. 3. Speed. If you can get a MVP up and running before another firm you have an advantage. Even if it’s in Excel and held together with spit and string.

Bees need some diversity in their diets. They consume nectar and pollen true, but that doesn't go far enough. If I offered you a diet of only Sugar cubes, Soya protein extract and Olive Oil you'd quickly die. Why? That diet has Carbs, Protein and Fat. That's everything a person needs!

It's a known issue that colonies cannot survive long term on substitutes. Why this is isn't clearly known yet but the assumption is that they are missing some dietary analogue to vitamin C.

I took it as a lampoon on the "Full stack dev in x" bullshit that gets tossed around. It does sound insane to expect the devs to also be marketing gurus and finance experts and legal wizards... but no one bats a eye at the idea of "PhD. ML who also knows front end JS".

Tactically yes, but it's often considered a greater honor to achieve an objective without loss of life.

Thank you for this. In my city we're fighting a slow battle against bylaws that make bee keeping illegal for very stupid reasons.

People need to calm down. You're more likely to die of lightning strike than bee sting in the US.

I believe the GP was refering to the production of films and movies. For example, much of the Lord of the Rings films were shot with forced perspective. How would that translate into a VR medium?

Hello from Halifax! Second time I've seen some of us here. Did we really spend that much on a that logo?

Does anyone else ever wonder if this is part of a long term strategy to reduce costs by inflating the pool of developers? Corporations can think long term.

If you view education as teaching people to learn, then you might have an argument that education rates enable and empower people. If you're training robots who don't think for themselves then you'll encounter the situation you've just described.

> latter case if the person who added another database/programming language/web toolkit/etc managed to achieve something with in in a short period of time.

This one bothers me. It's brought up all the time. And I completely agree that adding a new tool or feature adds risk and technical debt. But if there's no other way to do it... I work in a corporate VBA shop. 90 percent of our work in the last year was in VBA. But next year is looking like python, R and JS. How? Requirements changed. We got handed some projects in machine learning and we delivered, crudely but still. While in the technical sense we 'could' have coded it all in VBA it's not practical in the slightest to do so.

Interesting. I had no idea you guys were here in Nova Scotia. Does your company work only with social graphs or can the platform be extended to other applications?

Either way, looking forward to meeting you at Volta next week.

Gonna chime in here with a similar story. I was working at a call center a few years ago. Mostly sales stuff, but it was for a web company. I was taking moocs on the side, Udacity first, then coursera. I was always studying and that was noted by my superiors (in my spare time between calls for example) and eventually an internal opening was offered to me. I got luck there, chance to get off the phones and become an excel monkey. But not as lucky as what happened next, at the same time I’d finished the Stanford Databases class, a number of internal reports tied to a database broke. I had exactly the right about of experience to fix the issues and gain a little credit internally. I moved from a temporary role into a perminate one and started coding vba/sql stuff for the office.

From there I continued to learn and was eventually poached to another company. It could have gone faster if I’d been more visible, and I got lucky, but my degree is in Sociology, I learned to code in books and moocs. It can happen if you’re diligent and hard working.

I went from sociology major to developer mostly on moocs. Minored math though.

You're either underestimating social complexity or over estimating computer power. That's the same level of problem as simulating weather.

"Would it have been so bad to store those in a basement of the British Museum"

Well that made me think. The looting of the Iraq Museum always made me sad. Much of it is the common heritage of all people on earth.

No, not collectively, but acting as individuals they can attempt to take a first mover advantage. Make their money, and then they can retire; fuck you, got mine. We already see it with off shoring.

Well it does, if all else is head steady. But the issue seems to be that nothing is held constant in reality and the missing sugars are made up for with snacks elsewhere.

The diet coke is also associated with diet issues. Mainly that the pseudo sugars trick the brain into expecting a rise in bloodsugar level that never comes, leading to a crash.

It's easy if it's a lifestyle change and not just a diet until you're thin. If you give up cake so that you can lose weight so that you can eat cake again... well, you're gonna have a bad time.

You could also be avoiding potentially harmful substances which a diverse diet might have exposed you to. That they lived into their 90s on the same diet they had in their 20's implies they skipped TV dinners, Aerosol Cheese and McDonalds along the way.

6'4" 200 lbs here, marathon training and vegan... I eat very little refined sugars any more but I do consume a large amount of my calorie needs in grains and rices. Interestingly I was 230 or so in weight right up until I started cutting out the sugars, oreos are vegan, ice cream can be vegan, etc.

Except that humans are incapable of making objective observations in practice with anything resembling consistency.

You will eventually, no matter how careful you are, get a sting. Everyone does eventually when keeping bees. I'd get a checkup with a doctor to see how bad the reaction is. It'd be a good idea to keep an epipen around not just for yourself but also in case a visitor is allergic as well.