prions

Absolutely. In fact I've developed some Python programs for my own firm that have really sped up our productivity. It's actually led my to leaving civil engineering and going for my masters in CS soon! I hope one day I can make some wide changes in the industry but the market for it is quite small.

The issue with technology in municipal governments is with budgeting and the "It works, why do we need to change it?" mentality. Governments will still insist on things sent in formats that were modern 20 years ago, why should I have to send 5 paper copies by mail to the DEP or mail a CD?

The civil engineering industry as a whole is still very paper based as well. Paper copies are signed and sealed by hand and sent in copies out to clients/bidders. Having to spend time printing everything gets extremely time and resource consuming. The argument for this style though is that some projects have a big public liability and records must be kept.

There are pushes in the right direction, but change is slow and many don't see the incentive of upending entire systems even though they can provide a real benefit.

As a Civil Engineer myself, I feel like people don't realize the amount of underlying stuff that goes into even basic infrastructure projects. There's layers of planning, design, permitting, regulations and bidding involved. It usually takes years to finally get to construction and even then there's a whole host of issues that arise that can delay even a simple project. Case in point: I was the principal inspector for a small pump station project, estimated two weeks of construction and it took just over 3 months.

There's definitely room for improvement though. A big part of the issue is the mismatch between the private and municipal sides of the project. As someone on the private side as a consultant, it can be really frustrating to constantly jump through bureaucratic hoops that come across as massive wastes of time and money.

Can we remove:

-"Why x matters" -"What we know" -"Slammed" and -"Number x will shock you!"

from all news headlines?

It feels as though the open source community (I'm talking about the Linux Desktop space here) is being pulled in two different directions at the same time.

On one hand, there's a strong desire to have a closer to the metal experience, allowing more veteran users to quickly adapt and modify the software to how they see fit.

On the other hand, there's a push to bring new users in and create a more beginner friendly environment.

Frequently these two objectives clash with each other, especially when trying to find solutions for common problems. It's pretty common to see senior members complaining that the user is at fault for not reading the appropriate doc/guide (not to say the user is totally absolved from reading them), or seeking an "easier" solution that doesn't involve applying advanced terminal commands to people who have rarely used one before.

After using Debian based distros for a while, I switched to Arch. Installing wasn't too bad except for a few weird hiccups. The amount of looping from the help forums to the Arch Wiki, which doesn't contain your issue, would make your head spin.

Don't forget the disaster that's the 2nd ave "shared" bike lane, especially from the Queensboro Bridge and below.

I recently used BeautifulSoup in a Wikipedia scraping project. It's definitely a great tool but it had a few annoying functionality issues.

I had some preprocessing using decompose(), which can take lists of attributes. However it cannot decompose multiple attributes at once such as anchors with a certain title and table elements in one call. It felt cumbersome to call it multiple times.

It seems like Scrapy does exactly what I needed though (click on the first link in the article), which would have saved me a ton of headache. So it goes.

The issue with chemistry is that you need to develop a "feel" (chemical intuition) for a lot of topics. A lot of chemistry taught in undergrad, like Organic, cannot always be neatly explained or solved with an equation. On top of that there seems to be as many exceptions to rules as there are rules themselves.

Definitely agree about talking to others. I'm really lucky that most of my closest friends are awesome developers.

I'm about to start applying for full time developer jobs and grad school so I've been reflecting a lot on my journey to get here. It's going to be a leap but I'm confident I'll make it!

Thanks!

As someone whose been on a programming adventure for over a year now, this article hit a lot of great points.

I started learning from only basic knowledge gained in engineering school. I started small, but always strove to maintain a consistent amount of effort. Gotta pick up that hammer and swing it, even if it just means making one little crack in the wall.

The most difficult thing by far is silencing your own self doubt. It's too easy to think of the massive amount of knowledge you're supposed to know and immediately tell yourself you'll never make it. It's a skill in itself to just ignore those thoughts and keep pushing. What other option is there besides walking the path or giving up?

One thing I've noticed from other self taught programmers is that many will eschew the fundamentals. I believe it's really important to understand why a certain tool or framework came about and what issue it's trying to solve. Don't be afraid to step away from the hottest frameworks and cut to the basics.

Don't mitigate your accomplishments. So much work going on now is so complex and impressive! That doesn't mean your small project isn't any less of a personal achievement.

Keep learning, keep building and immerse yourself in the community. Don't forget to pick your head up every once in a while to see how far you've come.

I'm a engineer inspecting an unrelated project next to a superfund site in NJ (Toms River). The superfund site is now 22,000 acres of untouched wilderness. The municipal workers say it's now filled with all sorts of wildlife including coyote and turkeys.

As a non software person (civil engineer but going in for a CS masters), this is my biggest gripe when it comes to speaking with developers about their jobs: they lack perspective.

I can assure you that the bar for entry into my field is much higher than software. Like medicine and law, engineering requirements are strictly set by state law and professional boards. You need at minimum a bachelors in engineering to get a foot in the door. There is no self studying or civil engineering bootcamps. Afterwards, you need to become an engineer in training (EIT) by taking an entrance exam. Four years of experience later, you can sit for your professional engineers exam to become a licensed PE.

So now you're 8 years down the hole, finally licensed and ready to actually practice in a professional role. The kicker is that you're still probably making less than a fresh CS bachelors student working at <foo> corp in a tech hub.

I'll stick to posting on Reddit and contributing to projects.

It's no secret that the life sciences field is over saturated, competitive, and vastly underpaid with a high barrier for entry. Industry demand is low on both bachelors and doctorate level positions.

A bachelors really doesn't get you anything as a sciences student. Besides QA/Tech positions, there aren't many options to cut a viable path within the field. Most companies demand a minimum Masters with a preference for PhD's for most Scientist level positions. Having upward career mobility is very tough without a higher degree.

Spurned on by a lack of better options, most students pursue grad school in hopes of landing a tenure track position or hope their research aligns with relevant industry markets. Competition is insanely high though from the sheer churn of graduate students who are essentially cheap labor for their universities.

Unearthing the memories of my (long) years worth of organic chemistry classes, Hexagonal aromatic molecules are some of the most stable due to resonance. The shape of the molecule allows electrons to essentially ferry themselves between atoms of the structure to form double bonds, adding unique stability and reactive properties.

As a water engineer I find this pretty fascinating. Some issues I see on how this hasn't stuck throughout the 20th century:

700 psi is enormously high compared to current municipal water systems which rarely go over 150 psi. Maintaining and working on a pipeline of this size and pressure is more dangerous and very expensive. Over time, age will cause the network to lose pressure(through leaking, scaling, etc). How can facilities maintain power when a main line breaks? They would need their own water supply, tank and pumps in lieu of a diesel generator.

Electrical systems are generally much easier to install and work on. Piping is underground, large (compared to transmission wires) and much more prone to failures. A powerline going down can cause an inconvenience for a few days at most, but a broken water main will flood everything in its vicinity.

Also where will the water be sourced from? Municipalities are permitted to only draw a certain amount from their water supplies. This will definitely cause contention especially in drought conditions.

I'm a water treatment engineer. Carbon filtration will remove dissolved solids and heavy metals, and with high efficiency if done correctly. Most GAC columns designed to remove lead and heavy metals are enriched with sulfide ions to increase the removal efficiency as well. People prefer to use ion exchange resins to remove heavy metals because they can be regenerated more easily and efficiently. Also ion exchange resins allow you to recover any absorbed minerals.

http://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%290733-9372%28199...