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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Being comfortable with basic back-of-the-envelope math can be a huge benefit. (Full disclosure: i am a math major who is now a programmer)

    Over my career I have several examples of projects that have saved weeks worth of dev time because someone could predict the result with some basic calculations. I also have several examples where I have shown people some basic math showing that their idea is never gonna work, they don’t listen and do it anyway, and I see them 1 month later and the project failed in the way i predicted.

    A popular (and wise) saying is that “Weeks of work can save you hours of meetings”. I think the same is true for basic math. “Weeks of coding can save you minutes of calculation”.

    You can definitely be a successful programmer career without great math skills. Math is a tool that can help you be more effective.