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The Art of The Farewell Email 703

With so many people losing their jobs, the farewell email, letting colleagues and contacts know where you are moving and how you can be reached, has become common. Writing a really good one, whether it be funny, sad or just plain mad is an art form. Chris Kula, a receptionist at a New York engineering firm, wrote: "For nearly as long as I've worked here, I've hoped that I might one day leave this company. And now that this dream has become a reality, please know that I could not have reached this goal without your unending lack of support." In May, lawyer Shinyung Oh was let go from the San Francisco branch of the Paul Hastings law firm six days after losing a baby. "If this response seems particularly emotional," she wrote to the partners, "perhaps an associate's emotional vulnerability after a recent miscarriage is a factor you should consider the next time you fire or lay someone off. It shows startlingly poor judgment and management skills — and cowardice — on your parts." Let's hear the best and worst goodbye emails you've seen.

Comment APL (Score 1) 225

I know of APLers with about 40 years of software production on their belt. They still use functions and code they wrote in their first year. They claim it is much more fun to do something new than repeating oneself over and over again. If they write a new program, it mostly goes like this: take/copy some functions from library, add some database and string manipulation, drop in a stylesheet and voila your shiny new web-application. I have never seen them needing more than one or two days to finish a complete application, even quite complex ones.

Comment Re:incorrect (Score 1) 418

Well, it's not computer science, it's computer engineeering what is required. A lot of people love to talk philosophy on NP-hard, decision theory and the like, but do not have craftmanship of plain vanilla software development (including, but not limited to: OO, modern software architecure, patterns, regexp - hell: just using a decent editor to achieve simple formatting)!

Comment Re:V.I Arnold (Score 1) 418

I met him in Paris. It is really fun and very rewarding to discuss with him. I like his down-to-earth approach: Do not go for abstractions, but calculate the simplest cases right here and now! (Just do the math!). Abstractions then follow later. Quite a bit away from that high level stuff of QFT etc. But really fun.

Comment V.I Arnold (Score 2, Interesting) 418

I don't know if it has been mentioned here, but V.I. Arnold (Lectures on Partial Differential Equations) might be a starting point. Arnold emphasizes physics in his writing. His introduction to classical mechanics is an absolute must for everyone interested in this kind of topics! He really blows away the fog.

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