Chemistry and Computer Science
I am sure most of us have had a chance to enter a Chemistry lab when we were in school. In the schools that I went to, we had a Physics lab, a Chemistry, and a Biology lab.
A Biology lab primarily involved troubling another being, maybe dissecting a plant, a frog, a fish, or even a cockroach to find out more about it. It was not fun going to one where the class involved working with animals, especially coming from a family that eats no animals. But whatever said, feeling the scales of a fish, or observing a leaf under a microscope for the first time truly does open up
The Physics lab was enjoyable. Working with lenses, a tuning fork, or even static electricity was fun. Seeing how the image of a candle gets cast through a double concave mirror is infinitely more satisfying and I would say better embedded in your brain rather than trying to read the same thing a hundred times. I would say Physics is also a subject where you explain existing phenomena, not create new ones. It’s also about trying to prove what some of the great scientists thought and theorized.
But the best lab was Chemistry. This is where you could create stuff. Mix some liquids and something new would come of it. The brilliant red flame when you burn calcium and some white powder or salt that gets created at the end of it. The litmus paper would turn red or blue based on whether the liquid was acid or base. And lighting the Bunsen burner and holding a test tube with some liquids on it, was probably the first introduction to cooking. But you were creating stuff. Yes, someone might have already done it before, but it was still brand new for you. And this was also the place where you had to take extra precautions. Do you remember wearing a lab coat, and maybe a pair of glasses for those explosive experiments? There is a deep relation between Chemistry and Computer Science, as I do keep reading of Chemical Engineers going on to become famous Computer Science Engineers.
And this brings us to Computer Science or specifically a Computer Science lab. What is the fun in reading how a For loop works, rather than seeing it in action? What happens if you create an infinite loop, does your computer “hang”? Yes, “Hang” is a word we start using here. This is a place where new things. Or seeing “auto-scaling” work rather than reading about it in a textbook or an online article or maybe even watching a video. But, here is also where things can go wrong, horribly wrong. The infinite loop can hang your computer and you may hard reboot your system, and for those old folks reading it, if your computer has a magnetic disk, all bets are off in terms of the reboot getting your system back online. Or you got all excited and enabled auto-scaling, which kept creating new servers forever, your bill from that particular cloud vendor will go through the roof in no time. You need safety equipment. You should be able to reboot your system any number of times, without worrying about any harm coming to it. You should be able to learn auto-scaling, and if something goes wrong, then you should not be penalized too “heavily” for it :-). And this is where Nuvepro comes in. The policies, guard rails, and the Cloud platforms we use help you learn without fear and maybe create something new.
As someone well known saying, “enugh” reading and get working.
