Grae
Today Martin Weller wrote that, while the open source movement is a wildly successful model for producing software, we “haven’t really cracked a community based production model for learning content”. David Wiley followed up to say that, given our lack of progress in this area since the 90’s, he believes there’s “ a good argument to be made that a community…
I want you to do better work. I joke that my hobby is talking people out of going to law school. It’s a joke because it gets a chuckle, but it’s not really a joke because I do actually take every chance I get to talk people out of going to law school. If you’re planning a typical legal career then there is better work to be done. Source: XKCD Moving from law to technology was the…
When I first learned to program I didn’t explore too much. I played it safe. I took things I knew how to do and I applied those to each new problem I found, no matter how well suited the solution actually was to the problem. But, like any good technologist, I’m lazy. So if you give me a problem that (1) I know how to solve but (2) involves me doing a lot of repetitive work and (3)…
I got my start in computing early because my dad was disabled. He had a degenerative nerve disease and at some point, maybe when I was five or six, my clumsy little kid hands got better at wrangling computer parts than his own traitorous hands. You see his side hustle in the eighties was buying OEM computer parts, building computers, and selling those machines to consumers. This was before…
While I was at Thinkful our instructional design and features evolved a lot . At the beginning things were simple. The curriculum was plain text (a Google doc we shared) that curated 3rd-party resources and “explained” (in a way that will make instructional designers cringe) the remaining topics. It was a great MVP in that things really were minimal and it (mostly) worked. Over time we…
Back to primes! So far we’ve been able to get away with being a little greedy with our compute when playing with primes. Now Euler is ratcheting up the difficulty and we’ll have to focus on efficiency. As usual, if you haven’t spent time with Problem 7 yet, take a chance to play with it on your own and come back. Euclid teaching his students, detail from The School of Athens by…
Problem 6 has a brute force solution and an elegant formula solution that calculates the answer directly. But the brute force solution is good enough and the formula is obscure enough that I wouldn’t have found it without googling so we’ll focus on the brute force solution. As always, spend some time with the problem if you haven’t yet. Spent way too long on google images…
Problem 5 is a lot of fun (well, “fun”) because (1) there’s a very simple program requiring no math that calculates the answer, but (2) that program would need impossible amounts of compute to actually run, and (3) you can figure the answer with pen and paper super fast if you think about the math a bit. That’s what normal people consider fun, right? Since this problem…
Project Euler problem 4 feels like a step back in difficulty. The numbers involved aren’t too big so we don’t have to worry about resource constraints. The subproblems it breaks down into are fairly straightforward. If you haven’t yet, take some time with this problem on your own and continue on down below. Photo by Jingwei Ke on Unsplash Breaking the Problem Down We can break…
Problem 3 is where Euler starts forcing us to consider resource limitations. Before, the most straightforward solution worked just fine, even if it used more resources than a less complex algorithm would. As we’ll see here, that kind of solution, while correct doesn’t work for us because the program never finishes in a reasonable amount of time. If we’re going to solve this one…
Our first, and certainly not our last, encounter with the Fibonacci Sequence on Project Euler. Before we dive into Problem 2 together take some time to chew on it yourself if you haven’t already. Did you find a solution? If so have you been able to improve or streamline your first one? If not can you clearly describe to yourself what you’re stuck on? Modern mathematicians just…
This is a lovely problem to start with. It has a straightforward brute-force loop solution as well as a nice analytic solution where you can calculate the solution directly without the need for much programming. And it’s fizzbuzz ! What a great way to dive in. Who is this for? A quick note: this series of posts is meant for people who already have a development environment set up and are…
In 2012 I was a corporate lawyer at a big fancy firm. If you’d seen teenage me or college me you’d be understandably confused. Grae somehow ended up a lawyer? A corporate lawyer at a fancy firm? What? And if you know me today you might be similarly confused. My life as a corporate lawyer was short in part because of Project Euler. That winter Kelly, a law school classmate, shared an…