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by terminalcommand 3297 days ago
I am a law student. I always had an interest for computers.

It's been difficult to accept that I won't be studying CS. In those darkest of times advice from HN comments kept me afloat.

I can't imagine any other place where a 19-year old computer nerd could get a personalized advice from Ian Murdoch himself, before he passed away.

HN is a great place to learn about different fields of computing, get advice, find and read quality content.

I mostly like to read the discussions and come back for the dopamine rush I get from new stories :).

1 comments

That's really cool! Have you ever considered taking coding classes or code camps to go along with your law degree?
I'm continuing to code, I never stopped. Nowadays I code for fun, experiment with different languages, contribute to OSS projects.

Coding is not an issue for me, it comes naturally. Of course I wish I had the ability to receive formal training and I secretly envy people who are able to study and contribute to the field of CS.

However, after years of resistance, I came to realize that I also like law. Rules of society and software engineering have a lot of common. Both in Law and Programming you think of edge cases, debug thinks, try to express yourself clearly.

What's most interesting is that in Law, I also heard people using principles, which I am familiar from computers.

For example in a moot court I attended, a catchphrase was that "if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it's a duck". Or when we prepare for pleadings our coaches always instructed us to Keep It Simple. Another example is when we wrote a memorandum, we started with constructing an outline (a.k.a top-down design :D), we constantly made reviews, argued heavily about restructuring (a.k.a refactoring :) ).