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(Author here) The aspect of flexibility is really interesting. On the one hand, the lecturer role is way more flexible in that I can get my prep work done whene

(Author here) The aspect of flexibility is really interesting. On the one hand, the lecturer role is way more flexible in that I can get my prep work done whenever I want, and if I did find myself all done with prep, I could garden all day instead with no guilt. (That happened once in my 1.5 years!) On the other hand, there's a lot that's more inflexible than in a SWE job: lecture times, university-dictated exam times (at night! I had to sleeptrain my toddler to make them), staff meeting times (hard to find a time that works for a staff of 50-100). So yeah- more flexible in some ways, less flexible in others, it depends what sort of flexibility you're looking for.

truly 4y ago
As a (tenured) academic myself, I fully understand the flexibility (and the lack thereof). A staff of 50-100 sounds like a true nightmare. I've experienced classes of ~500 students myself, but 2000 seems quite excessive. Congratulations for trying out lecturing and for the eloquent writeup. P.S. Btw, I've stumbled upon your website https://www.recursionvisualizer.com/ https://www.recursionvisualizer.com/, which even works with memoized functions (in what seems to be a left-to-right call-by-value order), so I will be using this the next time I'm teaching dynamic programming or backtracking, in order to save time on drawing calls by hand on the board.
- pamelafox 4y ago
  Oo, nice! I was actually thinking of adding specific support for a @memoize decorator that would visualize what gets added to the memo, like the visualization I made more manually for this article (scroll down): https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/algorithms/recursive-algorithms/a/improving-efficiency-of-recursive-functions https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/algor... Don't know when I'll ever get around to it, pull requests welcome!

truly 4y ago

As a (tenured) academic myself, I fully understand the flexibility (and the lack thereof). A staff of 50-100 sounds like a true nightmare. I've experienced classes of ~500 students myself, but 2000 seems quite excessive. Congratulations for trying out lecturing and for the eloquent writeup. P.S. Btw, I've stumbled upon your website https://www.recursionvisualizer.com/ https://www.recursionvisualizer.com/, which even works with memoized functions (in what seems to be a left-to-right call-by-value order), so I will be using this the next time I'm teaching dynamic programming or backtracking, in order to save time on drawing calls by hand on the board.

pamelafox 4y ago
Oo, nice! I was actually thinking of adding specific support for a @memoize decorator that would visualize what gets added to the memo, like the visualization I made more manually for this article (scroll down): https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/algorithms/recursive-algorithms/a/improving-efficiency-of-recursive-functions https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/algor... Don't know when I'll ever get around to it, pull requests welcome!