Dusting off my maths skills

There’s so much information around today. You can learn absolutely anything you want.

Today, for instance, I’ve been reading up on Anerobic digesters. It’s a pet project of mine that I’m hoping to build one later in the year. (Client projects take priority, but I like to leave room for some fun personal projects as well. Especially when they’re not IT-related!)

But all of my reading today, is actually just me procrastinating from finishing the first problem set for my Solar Cells, Fuel Cells & Batteries course that I’m doing through Stanford University.

It might be my rusty maths skills that are to blame. I’m having to use skills I’ve not touched for a decade or more. (Even this blog post is a procrastination of sorts)

It’s funny. You’d think programming is quite a mathematical thing to do, but that’s not what I’ve found. I’ve mostly implemented business logic in my past projects and any maths involved is normally pretty fundamental stuff that you could do in your head.

Admittedly I needed to study a fair bit of maths to get my NZCE (New Zealand Certificate in Engineering). But now I’m having to remember how to factorise (You remember: “solve for x?”) and in a way, it’s feeling like I’m learning it for the first time.

Makes me wonder if our teachers were fibbing to us about having to use maths after school. Seems like I’ve hardly needed it at all…