Yesterday was Super Tuesday, so I stayed up too late last night and drank too much under the guise of watching the results come in, but of course I had to finish the six pack and stayed up even later watching High Maintenance and woke up slightly hungover. I’ve actually got a work project to do this afternoon after class, and just remembered I’m meeting with another professor to work on my final credit. Hopefully I’ll have time to talk about the things I wrote about yesterday regarding education.
I spent a good deal more on the class notes in Overleaf, pouring over various Wikipedia pages and shaking my head at some of the academic paper around finite differences. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I’m going to do anything with regard to numerical analysis, I’m going to have to get a grip on some of this higher order math, and started watching the lectures for MIT’s course on the subject. One of their grads did an excellent Finite Difference Calculator, and he mentions the text and professor before giving the breakdown on how he expands a bunch of Taylor series equations to come up with the answers. I figured I’d go straight to the source, and enjoyed the first lecture in it so far.
The course leans heavily on MatLab, which I checked out last week. Thankfully, the university has a site license, so I get to play around with that as well. I’m not sure how much of this I’m going to complete before graduation; I suppose it makes a master’s degree all the more likely.
I continue coding the matrix classes in C++. I had to give up on using my custom vector class and went back to just using a C-style double pointer array. There was a problem with trying to initialize this within the context of the matrix itself. The problem is that in order to declare an array of class vector, the class needs a default constructor. My constructor requires a size argument, and getting it to work properly would require either some sort of template argument function that I don’t understand, or a zero size default constructor which would then have to be followed by a resize operation. The later seems like it would be a mistake from a performance perspective, and I just don’t have time to muck with all this right now.
I’ve got unit tests working, and I’m currently in the process of refactoring this generic matrix class out of my Gaussian Elimination class. Unit testing is coming along well. I’ve got override stream operators for input and output, and things are going well.
Now if I could just figure out what to do after I graduate. Where to go, rather. I’m listening to a podcast with the CEO of Twilio, talking about how they built a platform. It’s really interesting and got me thinking about all the fun stuff I’ve done with them in the past. Their API is really amazing. But two points from that pod that has struck with me. The first is how he says the business world has evolved from “buy or build” to “build or die”. Businesses are becoming software companies. I love the fact that ING is using Agile methodology for their core business. Brilliant. The second point is around “ask your developers”, sort of like “ask your doctor”, but for business problems. The conversation has got me thinking about my day job. I’d love to be able to instill some of this there, but the culture just isn’t there. I’m not sure that it’s compatible with a franchise system.
I can see this goal in my head, it’s a feeling of where I’m going to be soon, and the realization that a lot of things are going to be left behind. The business I’m in, maybe even this area. Watching the primary results roll in from Colorado and Massachusetts last night made me think that I need to take the possibility of moving more seriously.