Why Americans don't eat horse meat, and the difference between C# and VB.NET

If you followed the news in 2013, you remember the horse meat scandal that reverberated mostly in Europe - meat labeled as 100% beef in supermarkets, restaurants and fast food eateries was found to contain horse meat, either in traces or in large percentages.

Why as this a big deal? Mislabeling food is a safety issue, and it also goes against basic modern consumer rights. However, the uproar at the time would have us think that horse meat is subpar, unhealthy, or even hazardous. This is of course untrue, as meat from horses is eaten is several parts around the world, and considered a delicacy in some.

Americans and Western Europeans largely view horses as powerful, intelligent animals that are meant to be kept as pets rather than ground up into sausages. But why is that? My father, a champion of common sense, put it as such: historically, cattle and pig are much more docile and easier to herd, are cheaper to maintain, and overall produce more meat than other animals (these are reasons we don't farm horses, rabbits, or grizzly bears). As such, we've become a society that overwhelmingly eats chicken, beef, and pork over other meats.

This brings me to another interesting distinction I had a hard time understanding lately. From many job postings I've explored, it seems that much of the windows-based software shops prefer C# instead of VB.NET. Of course, these are both .NET languages and thus incredibly similar, besides syntactical differences and other minor differences (see this stackoveflow article for more). Being a VB.NET developer, this irked me a bit. This question came up with a hiring manager recently, and he explained another facet of the C# preference very eloquently. We all know that C# evolved from C++ while VB.NET evolved from Visual Basic. Among colleges teaching computer science, C++ has historically been the language of choice, while Visual Basic was often taught in the business school. Therefore, seeing C# on a resume has a connotation of greater technical knowledge.

I can confirm this looking at the curriculum of the great University of Florida, my alma mater. My comp sci friends all took C++ (with a few stragglers who opted for Java), although I myself, as an industrial engineer, had VB on the track. Not many business majors I knew were required to take programming.

So, it would seem historical preference affects us in different ways. Bon apetit, and happy coding.

Sometimes in life, we need to take a Risk

I'm a Florida boy, through and through. After graduating in late 2012, I settled into a comfortable, well-paying first job in Tampa. After one year, I decided to leave. A few months later, I'm in Boston living on savings (and occasionally a friend's couch). Why? Because I felt I could do more. I felt I needed to do more.

I don't romanticize struggle or hardship, like many young graduates do. Steve Jobs famously lived on the edge of poverty and homelessness before making it big with Apple, and his story serves as an inspiration to many for following their passion in start up ventures. That's not the life for me. But I do romanticize learning.

This blog is dedicated partially as a digital portfolio of my projects, and also for my current thoughts. We begin with the classic board game Risk, which I recreated in Excel VBA - first as a school assignment, but then as an expansive personal project. You could say this was truly my first software project.

Initial board setup

The game is based on shape clicks which connect to macros. Based on previous actions, the program correctly tracks which phase of the game we are on, and what each click triggers

Active gameplay

The attack/defend algorithm works based on the classic dice roll rules in the original Risk, and is quite simple. To make things easier on record keeping, we easily leverage Excel's spreadsheet structure as a primitive database to store records

Hidden worksheet which tabulates player/territory data

I'm constantly updating this project, and currently working on a simplified AI so single-player mode would be possible. If anyone wishes to challenge their friends, or take a look at some of my code, the game is available. Click here to download!