I used this book to teach a course. It definitely encourages you to think of programming as a means to an end, and not a skill in and of itself. That is completely fine IF that is what you want, and from your post, it sounds like it is.
If you find you’d like to dive a little deeper, I enjoy the Think Python book as a more “mathematical” and “rigorous” introduction. That doesn’t mean it’s harder. It just means it has a different approach and end goal!
Yes, once. Our research lab’s in-house software suddenly started throwing segfaults. The update was from the Mac side (OS), not the software side, so it would’ve been near impossible to figure out exactly which feature of the software no longer played nice with the new MacOS. We (me and a mentor) used git bisect to figure out what feature didn’t work, and patched it for the new OS update.
The next week I went and bought a new laptop and installed Linux on it so that didn’t happen again.
The people who voted for these politicians are by and large not the demographics being fucked over by those policies. I also used to feel like the right response was to laugh at these states, and being reminded that people who didn’t want these policies are still suffering from them didn’t really convince me of anything–after all, collectively, isn’t that the community they’re choosing to live in?
What changed my mind about that is realizing the harm is disproportionately distributed. Disenfranchised people are LESS likely to vote republican but MORE likely to suffer the effects of republican government. So when “they get what they voted for”, it’s really, “the poor get what the rich voted for”, and that doesn’t make me happy to laugh at at all.
What do people think of a “journalistic integrity” rule? I know that’s also subjective, but I’m trying to think of how to phrase a rule that is basically “don’t post intentionally incendiary crap”. I guess the rule could just be “don’t post intentionally incendiary crap”, with some examples of what that means and community opportunities to in some way indicate that an article is incendiary crap.