[mattmalin]

I'm also an actuary, but do some coding in my own time. I'm primarily here due to interest on current technology and programming trends and generally interesting articles.

Our team does a lot of analysis programming in R rather than taking the more common Excel/VBA approach. This allows common practices in software development such as version control tools (and the collaboration they can help with), testing, deployment strategies, etc, to be a major part of the usual workflow that would otherwise be missing from the usual speadsheet world so exposure to HN helps promote this in my mind as good practice.

The main draw of HN for me is the consistently high quality of posts and comments. I can be sure that were I to see the same content posted across general news sites, or other aggregators such as Reddit, then HN would be the only place I'd care to look and be certain that I'd also be learning plenty (often more than the original article) from the HN comments alone.

[Bootvis]

    Our team does a lot of analysis programming in R rather than taking the more 
    common Excel/VBA approach. This allows common practices in software development 
    such as version control tools (and the collaboration they can help with), 
    testing, deployment strategies, etc, to be a major part of the usual workflow 
    that would otherwise be missing from the usual speadsheet world so 
    exposure to HN helps promote this in my mind as good practice.

One nice trick your average actuary won't come up with is recursively exporting all your VBA code. The model I'm building is one big .xlsm referencing .xla's referencing other .xla's. By selecting the .xlsm in the VBA IDE we can export all code to a folder (with sub folders for every part) and put this in version control.

Unfortunately, unit testing remains difficult in Basic. I try to control the problems caused by a lack of test by regularly regressing the enormous amounts of output we have. If things that shouldn't change, change we know we have a problem. Of course, this testing can be automated.