After a year of doing freelance programming\/consulting, I have a better understanding of why some people choose academia or research as a career path: Intellectual stimulation. I have been working mostly with website and webshop backend programming and on a day-to-day basis, the recipe is basically the same:<\/p>\n
Over time, I see myself writing the same or very similar code over and over again for every new feature that needs to be added even when I try to reuse the same code — and it bores the hell out of me sometimes.<\/p>\n
Actually, while studying, I was not particularly interested in theory. I always liked the programming more than the theory and the latter is usually more emphasized. It is ofted noted that college is not preparing students<\/a> with proper programming skills for “the real world” and that a dedicated software development education<\/a> might be a good idea. I agree.<\/p>\n But now I’m going of at a tangent. My point is, when I was in school, I was displeased with theory (because “hated” is such a strong word) and I fell asleep while reading any research paper or computer science book (this still haunts me. Reading CS books seems to be important for developers. I just cannot do it). But now, I miss the intellectual stimuli from academia. This is one of the reasons I have been pushing myself to find time to work on Antecons<\/a>, a project that has forced me to dig into a number of research papers on association rule learning. (By the way, the recommendations made by Antecons are actually being added by the users to the shopping carts at vildmedvin.dk<\/a>. I can thus assume that it is raising profits. This is a great success, given its currently limited and quite crude functionality)<\/p>\n This blog post does not have a particular message or opinion. This is thought flow and I have just been wondering what other people do to cope with boredom in their jobs. Sometimes, boring work is inevitable, I know. But when more than half of one’s work is boring, is it then time to start rethinking one’s situation?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After a year of doing freelance programming\/consulting, I have a better understanding of why some people choose academia or research as a career path: Intellectual stimulation. I have been working mostly with website and webshop backend programming and on a day-to-day basis, the recipe is basically the same: Create a datatable in a database. Create […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[77,78,76,45],"class_list":["post-361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industry","tag-academia","tag-computer-science","tag-intellectual","tag-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidlebech.com\/thoughtflow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}