!rant
Observed a full deployment the other day and discovered it's extremely inefficient. I proposed an idea to fix it, and was shot down by a senior dev on the team. I was ranting about how asinine the process was and how my process could reduce the amount of time and training required to do deployments with out any additional cost or overhead. A senior dev from another department over heard me, found my workspace and told me (in a nutshell), "write up a document about why the current process is garbage and how yours is better, and how it works, I'll review it and we'll get it worded and formatted right. When we finish the document, I'll forward it to the CTO of your department with your name on it and my recommendation for review." Fuck yeah. 😈😎

"How useful was your CS degree and why?" - I studied CS at university, my education always was incredibly useful.

Firstly, the knowledge you gain in itself is useful. Furthermore, we explain and understand the unknown in terms of the known. Thus, the more you know, the easier you learn new things.

But secondly and more importantly, university teaches you *how* to think. In a structured way, like a scientist or engineer. To see the bigger picture.

I originally wanted to end here, but I've read a couple of entries doubting the usefulness of any CS degree.

Our profession isn't all that different from others. It is, however, relatively young. How's this for an analogy: We're still in the stage of building sand castles. That's fine, and can be self taught. But in years to come we'll want to build bridges and sky scrapers, which are not just "sand castles scaled up". Our sand castle knowledge won't help us here. Sky scrapers need entirely different materials and a good understanding of architectural statics.

Can you still teach that yourself? Maybe. Will a formal education with a degree be useful and generally more trusted? I bet.

This might not be a perfect place to post this, but we are trying to get help from all possible places.

As you may know, Kerala, a state in India, is going through the worst time of its history. We are exposed to tumultuous and disastrous flooding which have destroyed both our life and living.
All the rivers, streams and lakes are overflowing throughout the states due to heavy rainfall. The shutter of all the dams have been opened and the water rush have washed away the towns and villages on it's flood path. The situation is much more frightening than we can explain.
Over 250000 people are in rehabilitation camps. Even hospitals are under water. The count of the lives that we have lost and people missing are still not confirmed yet. The roads, bridges and homes damaged are beyond repair. Rivers have been spilling over and the hills are crashing down in landslides to thickly-populated settlements. Our government and rescue bodies are doing commendable work for saving each and every life, but are facing severe shortage of funds and resources. This has affected the efficiency of the rescue efforts, which also contribute to the increasing death toll. It is estimated unofficially that the cost of disaster can be up to 100 billion INR, which seems to be a huge fund for our small state.
So hereby we are requesting your kind donation and aid towards relief fund of the state.Your valuable donations will grossly help us to ease our efforts for relief, re-habitilation and re-building.

I'm not posting any links where you can donate, I'm aware that you guys can google it.

Instant gratification. Because building bridges takes way too long...