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8 years ago I graduated with a bachelors degree in pure math and theoretical physics. 2 years later I settled down and decided to just become a software engineer building CRUD apps. Since graduating I've consistently looked for a job that explicitly had software and pure math requirements, but I've continuously come up short.

In theory, I think two good avenues for you to check out would be: 1) building physics and game engines at a company like Unity; 2) building the knowledge engine behind something like WolframAlpha/Mathematica. It's possible you'll need graduate school experience to be competitive for these jobs.

I'd guess that no matter what you're going to end up doing some kind of programming. I don't think formal education is required for this.

This morning I started to stir when my Casper Glow light turned on. But what really got me out of bed was when I heard the faint gurgle of my timed coffee machine auto brewing the first cup of the day.

Hundred Rabbits[0] have been an inspiration for me for a while. They work from their sailboat!

[0] https://100r.co/site/off_the_grid.html

There's no surfing in BC ;)

You make a great point about finding remote work. I lived in the Victoria area before I left Canada and found that a lot of my peers worked remotely for US-based companies. During the pandemic, some were even able to get a US market rate salary instead of being paid based on the Victoria location. This made living in Victoria much more manageable.

Canadian software engineer here. About a year ago I moved away from Canada specifically because cost of living was too high compared to Canadian market-rate salaries in the software industry. Many of my Canadian peers have done the same.

Canada is a wonderful place with some of the best nature and some really lovely cities, but I would not move there to improve my financial situation.

100% really hope Andrew Jervis is able to keep his show going. So much of the music that I keep coming back to is music that I discovered through his show!

Another vote for bandcamp. Definitely higher effort, but also higher reward in my opinion. One of my favourite things to do is sit on the sofa with my headphones on and actively listen to a few new bandcamp discoveries. It's really fun finding a new musician deep down a rabbit hole and having to try to decide for myself whether this is good music that I want to listen to again. Sometimes it's not, and that makes this method more time consuming, but I've also found most of my favourite musicians using this method.

Another great source is the Bandcamp Weekly with Andrew Jervis. If you're looking for something curated that is a little less effort, this is a great option.

Office Space, Fight Club, American Beauty, and I Heart Huckabees satirized the dreary emptiness of white collar life. Didn’t my coworkers realize how ridiculous it sounds to use this jargon?

Fight Club had an enormous influence on me during my teenage years. It would kill the younger version of myself to learn the kind of white collar environment I operate in every day.

On one hand, Corpspeak is one of the most consistent forces of office life that beats the dying young punk voice that still whispers to me from time to time. Why don't we all just quit the tip-toeing and cut to the heart of each interaction? This way we would all be acting in our most authentic form. This would be a hardcore way to build something great together.

On the other hand, as the author describes, Corpspeak allows me to gloss over any bad feelings that may be felt or insinuated by myself or my colleagues. Although it feels inauthentic and may increase existential dread if pondered too closely, this "glossing over of feelings" makes the job less tiring, and enables me to show up for 40 hours, week after week. It also leaves me with tons of energy leftover to live the other 128 on my own terms — as long as I don't think too deeply about it all.

I completed a four-year honours level program at a research university. Math has always been one of my biggest passions, but I wanted some real world work experience before heading into grad school.

Fast-forward four years: I now work in software and, as others have said, I have tried and failed to find anyone who cares that I have studied high-level pure math/theoretical physics. So if I ever want back, it would be purely out of passion, not for any professional gains.

I have considered going back just to fulfill the passion side, but right now that passion does not outweigh the burden of potentially going without an income and paying out of savings to support myself and my family while I get a graduate degree, and I doubt that it ever will. I've done a lot of work to make peace with this fact of life. I have a lot of other passions, and I focus on those instead.

I also experience Deuteranopia. I am usually only impacted if I'm trying to read a chart which requires that I map the colors in a legend to the colors on the lines/bars. This is usually impossible for me to do if there are >2 colors.

I use IntelliJ for my IDE, which has a color blind mode plugin. Before I discovered this, there were shades of orange and red that made some of the syntax highlighting useless.

My company uses Bitbucket, and the red/green colors they use for "lines added" and "lines removed" in code reviews are really hard to see. I usually have to use the side-by-side diff instead of the unified diff. Example here [1].

Otherwise, there's no real impact IMO. If I'm working on front-end stuff, I just use the hex codes that the designers tell me to use. If I'm working with a designer that is particularly interested in accessibility, they'll often ask me "hey can you see the colors on this layout?".

[1] https://bitbucket.org/product/features/code-review

This is Water by David Foster Wallace

I'm also getting a timeout. Your mirror worked for me.

Also lots of Math is involved in what I specifically do.

I’ve always dreamed of using my math skills in my day job. What kind of math do you work with? Any tips on finding positions like this?

I’ve always wondered if jobs like this exist, but I’ve never actually seen a job posting for one. As a developer with a math degree, these kinds of jobs have always been something of a dream for me. Any tips on where to look?

Another whole-album-listener here, but I'm the minority among my peers (millennials). I find looking for complete albums where all of the songs are high quality really guides my taste when I'm looking for new music. If an artist's album consists of one amazing song and 11 bad ones, I likely won't listen to that artist again. The artists that have been able to knit 12 songs into a narrative and provide an enjoyable listening experience are the ones I keep coming back to year after year.

More and more employers these days offer access to workplace giving software that enables people to donate money to causes of their choice and get matching from their employer. There are also a lot of employers matching volunteer time for their employees. If you work at a place like this, you can make a difference simply by providing financial and/or volunteer support to some of the causes that you care about.

Additionally, there are enterprise software companies out there that enable the kind of volunteer matching and donation matching that I mentioned above. This software usually falls into the category of "workplace giving". Working on software like this could provide some of the goodness hit that you're looking for.

100%. You picked up on something that I thought about but didn’t write in the post in the end. All through undergrad I had one friend in my program who was laid back but also interested in math. Trying to find more people like this. I don’t imagine it has gotten much easier, but hoping that being online and not limited by physical location would help.

I'm about to embark on building a tiny house this summer. We have done a lot of planning and a lot of learning so far (this is our first major building project).

The more I think about the space, the more I realize how minimalist I will have to be. I have been pairing down my possessions over the last couple of years already. But I think I will have to take my minimalism to another level in order to not feel too confined in our new small space.

As another response mentioned, costs will add up surprisingly fast. We were surprised when we got our plans and started adding up the costs of building supplies. We've pivoted a little bit and will be sourcing a lot of materials free/used from our community.

A notification seems like it would be a great idea. Users could ignore it and carry on with with the free listening premise. But the very existence of the platform seems to be based on the fact that listeners will choose to support artists, so a notification to support will probably appreciated and heeded by listeners.

Listen to your favorite music for free on any device.

Do you plan on adding a paywall when a listener has heard a song a certain amount? I’m a huge fan of Bandcamp, and I love that I hit a paywall when I’ve heard an album a certain number of times. Reminds me that there’s an artist behind the music and that I obviously like the album enough to buy it. Often I’ll buy the album on Bandcamp but then find it on my streaming service and listen to it there (easier for adding to playlists, etc).

Build and launch a small SaaS before you start your PhD. Then while your PhD is in progress, offer support and small feature improvements that don't take up too much of your time.

I love the idea of taking sabbatical. If I were to take time for one, I think the structure would look more like what you're suggesting here. Expanding network of people to learn from and contributing to OSS.

As introverted as I am, I have learned in recent years how much easier and faster it can be to learn from other people than from textbooks alone.

Another vote for Fastmail. I've been using it with my own domain for the last couple of years with zero problems.