I wrote some PowerQuery functions and VBA macros to facilitate client invoicing that cut down ~2 hours of work to ~10 minutes (and shrinking, as I toy around with the scripts to delegate more of the work to the machine each time).
The billing data is pulled from an external vendor's portal. The contact data is pulled from our internal CRM. Both sets of data are then cleaned up and merged with PowerQuery, and then VBA is used to send emails out to clients.
I probably spent in the range of 3-4 hours getting a working version going and ~20 hours optimizing during downtime at work. I genuinely find it enjoyable to work on—there is something immensely satisfying about automating rote work away.
I use this once per month (a billing cycle). It will probably never see the light of day for anyone else, at least in its current state, because I work in a low-tech, nonprofit environment and using this kind of tool would be daunting for my co-workers (for reference, mail merging is sometimes intimidating at my workplace).
I am assuming that GP was not specific about Chinese investors' money due to national security concerns or sinophobia. More pressing, especially to anyone hoping to live anywhere near Vancouver, is the fact that Chinese investors account for 1/3 of the total sales volume of property (2016 figures). [1]
While loyalty to the craft can have the side effect of generating more value to an employer, I don't think the two notions are antagonists. Get better at your craft and you'll have more opportunity to operate as a mercenary.
* A community fork of a language named after a plant fungus. All of the memory-safe features you love, now with 100% less bureaucracy! *
I assumed with the 'oxide' and 'ferrous' references that Rust's etymology had to do with corrosion, and while that's part of the explanation, it's mostly about fungi [1]
Why should someone's respect for (presumably) achievements as a technologist or entrepreneur extend to opinions about events like these (or really any event outside of business/technology?)
> [This analysis] notes that the criminal justice system is more lenient toward white-collar offenders than nonviolent property offenders and that affluent offenders are less likely to serve prison sentences than poor offenders even when they have committed the same offense.
Even if English is the lingua franca of the world, people master it to varying degrees. Also, it seems like 'quitted' was the more common form up until the ~late 1930s [1], so it's not entirely unreasonable to assume that, if this person learned with some vintage material or they read classics, they've seen 'quitted' more often.
As far as I understand, universities' reasoning for differential tuition varies from demand for a particular major, projected earning potential, and the cost of providing the major itself (for example, a civil engineering student requires all the material and facilities for their labs and field courses).
In Canada, this differential pricing between engineering and other majors is applied to all engineering disciplines, which is why software ends up with a higher cost than computer science, despite there being very few tangible differences in the curricula.
In my opinion, a model like that of your school's is much more reasonable, given that many of the core classes are the same.