Another option is to bring your coding skills to a industry not particularly known for using tech.

IMHO Good Riddance to such a toxic community.

This median of 5yrs experience is also backed up by Stack Overflow surveys (and Python surveys).

So where do they all go (I doubt the number of grads is doubling)?

I think a lot realise that programming is not their bag and move into account management, IT support, Business Support, or even other career's entirely.

Thank you for this. I had never considered this "drift" in recipes and ingredients.

Something that I didn't notice until I lived in the US was the implicit availability of standard ingredients, like graham crackers. So many classic American recipes are very simple but assume you have access to that one brand of canned pumpkin or cherries that everyone uses to make their pie with. It makes online recipes a lot easier.

A beverage example is the Piña Colada. The original recipe calls for Coco Lopez (see the Regan, The Joy of Mixology), and while you could substitute for some other coconut cream (confusingly, not cream of coconut), it's got the expected amount of sugar and thickeners in that make the classic drink. It's a specialty food in Europe and I assumed it was an antiquity, but no, our local supermarket sells it.

Yeah, it's like people who spend time around campfires and have watched American media are all going "let's make s'mores" [1], and then they realize that "graham crackers" [2] are a mystery ingredient that nobody knows anything about.

Digestives [3] are the typical substitution in my experience, but again nobody knows how close they're getting. They look thicker, to me ...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%27more

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_cracker

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestive_biscuit

Well also that you can buy graham cracker crumbs, for making things like pie crusts. My friend gave me a weird look when we went shopping and I picked up whole crackers. And then the revelation that graham refers to a type of flour and is not in itself a brand. And Kelloggs sell the crumbs? Wild.

A biscuit base in the UK would usually require a pack of digestives and a rolling pin. I suppose some supermarket sells crumbled biscuits but...

As an aside, Golden Grahams used to be popular in the UK and I don't think anyone stopped to ask what the name meant.

Golden Grahams is popular in France too, but as a foreign name, nobody ever looked it up.

Digestives are a bit thicker, but the ones I had while over there weren't substantially so. You're less likely to get the shared experience of dealing with the goopy mess all over your fingers because your graham is shattering at the first bite.

Digestives actually is a pretty good sub! Yeah theyre thicker but I think the most substantial difference is that graham crackers are significantly harder and less crumbly.

If you’re in the UK/Europe, the best alternative I’ve found are Bahlsen’s Milk Dark Chocolate Leibniz.

Still has the issue of what is this branded product really though.

I think another option is chocolate 'malted milk' (in the UK) - depending on your preference for ratio of biscuit to chocolate to marshmallow. Leibniz will have more/thicker chocolate, but malted milk will break a bit easier in the mouth (softer/crumblier biscuit).

I feel like some of that is just branding efforts. Lots of food companies will put their brand onto the soy sauce/butter/whatever that they are promoting when writing recipes and those get copied.

But while you can talk about reproducibility etc, at the end of the day the amount of variation between various brands of canned pumpkins are less that the amount of variation _you_ should consider when making a recipe to match the tastes of those you are making it for.

We have plenty of foods we make at home where we routinely just look at the base recipe and decide "that is too much/little salt/sugar/etc" and we are happy in the end. Harder for baking tho.

I first learned of it reading the intro to American Cake, by Anne Byrn. It covers the history of cakes in America, through (updated) 125 recipes.

The current recipe for pound cake calls for 6 large eggs, but the notes on ingredients in the book’s introduction said early recipes needed 12-16 (!!) eggs in order to get one pound of eggs. Side note: pound cake uses 1 lb each of eggs, flour, sugar, and butter

6 large (US) eggs is between 12oz and 14.5oz.[0] This has been stuck in my head since I first learned European sizes were different.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_egg_sizes#United_State...

Could the six eggshells weigh half an ounce each? It's easier to weigh eggs whole.

That would imply, though, that "one pound" of eggs is more egg now than it was then.

That table includes the weight of the shell. I don't think six chicken eggs of a normal size were ever a pound.

This is very interesting.

I recently bought an older Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from 1953. I wanted one from before science took over the kitchen too much. I haven’t had a chance to cook anything from it yet, but now I’m questioning if I’ll have issues trying to cook with a 70+ year old cookbook, especially when it comes to baked goods.

I’m not into cooking enough to have the patience to experiment and tune things. If something doesn’t work, I’m more likely to get discouraged and order take out.

Sizes are different but also appliances were a lot more temperamental back then; the first oven with a temperature control was only developed in the 20s and it would take a while for them to be in every home.

If anything, much older recipes tend to be less precise simply because they did not have the technology. Before thermostats were put in ovens, baking was done by feeding a fire by vibes, and then leaving your baked good to sit in the residual heat.

If you see this reply, may I ask a favor?

The very first thing I learned to cook as a young kid in the late 1950s was a macaroni and cheese recipe from the BH&G cookbook. It was very different frum the creamy mac and cheese recipes that are common today. It didn't have a runny sauce; it had more of a firm custardy texture. You could scoop up chunks of it with a big serving spoon.

I did some brainstorming with ChatGPT, and we found the recipe below.

Could you check your cookbook to see if it has a recipe like this, and possibly take a photo and send it to me? Email is in my profile. Thanks!

---

Old-Fashioned Baked Macaroni and Cheese (circa 1950s BH&G style)

Ingredients:

1½ cups elbow macaroni (uncooked)

2 cups grated sharp cheddar cheese

2 eggs, beaten

2 cups milk (sometimes evaporated milk was used)

1 tsp salt

Dash of pepper

Optional: breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs for topping

Optional: butter for dotting the top

Instructions:

Cook the macaroni in salted water until just tender. Drain.

In a large bowl, combine the hot macaroni with most of the grated cheese.

In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the milk, salt, and pepper.

Pour the egg-milk mixture over the macaroni and cheese, stir gently to combine.

Pour into a buttered casserole dish. Top with the remaining cheese, and optionally a layer of buttered breadcrumbs or crushed crackers.

Bake at 350°F for about 45 minutes, or until set and lightly browned on top.

By chance, someone posted the text on Reddit two years ago,

https://old.reddit.com/r/Old_Recipes/comments/ydmncf/searchi... ("From Better homes and gardens cookbook 1953")

The one in this very specific 1953 cookbook is not an egg-based custard, but uses as a thickening agent condensed mushroom soup, from a can.

Very interesting, thanks! That one is very different from what my little sister and I made as kids. Ours was more like the one from ChatGPT that I posted above.

We were big fans of cream of mushroom soup, though. Our favorite was to mix a can of that and a can of tomato soup (with the usual 50/50 dilution with water). We called it "cream of tomato".

My standard cookbook is a 1970s edition of the Joy of Cooking, right before fat became evil and was excised from cookbooks. Everything from how to break down a squirrel to a side of beef.

I have no issues cooking from it with modern ingredients because it doesn't fundamentally use things that aren't "base" ingredients or other recipes in it.

So very true.

And then over time these Excel spreadsheets become a core system that runs stuff.

I used to live in fear of one of these business analyst folks overwriting a cell or sorting by just the column and not doing the rows at the same time.

Also VLOOKUP's are the devil.

Why also sorting by row? And why are vlookups the devil? my undergrad was finance, but I've self-learned a lot of CS.

It's possible to sort just a single column, leaving all the columns beside it in their original sort order. That's very bad if you want to keep your rows in one piece.

Oh, duh yeah. That's such a natural thing to avoid I hadn't considered it

I tried it on an image of me and a horse in front of a paddock and it worked perfectly. Really impressed.

Other background removal tools would find me - but erase half the horse or erase his tack or his ears. This tool worked perfectly.

Very well done!

In my SaaS software I made the conscious decision to record names as "full_name" (e.g. Mary Smith) which is basically your legal name and then "short_name" (e.g. Mary) which is what I would address a letter to.

This handles a whole bunch of issues with people who have just one name (which I believe is high status in some cultures) and cultures where the family name is first and then the given name.

I have had very little issues with it - even though most customers expect first_name and last_name.

I had a police officer talk to me about my software and they were mucho impressed about how this naming system handles all the different name types. They say some of their system have issues all the time with some names.

Is it a perfect system? No, but it seems to be one of the better ones.

If you want to really do it right, so it works for everyone, this is the only way.

However, when I actually did it this way, it caused problems as soon as we partnered with another company and had to communicate with a system designed in a less-progressive manner. (I.e., about 99.5% of existing systems.) We couldn’t generate an export for that partner without first and last name fields, and we had no way to reliably generate those from the full name field.

So, ironically, if we had let the user decide how to compromise the integrity of their name up front, we would have had a better user experience than after our computer started butchering it for them.

I guess we just can’t have nice things.

I'd like to do that, but our software has to integrate with a ton of different other SaaS software which often has dumb first/last splits, so the dumb business logic often oozes across.

Do you ask users for both? i.e. "please enter your full name", "please enter the name by which you'd like us to call you"

I do!

The join form says:

- Your full name (e.g. Mary Smith)*

- Your short name (e.g. Mary)*

And I have placeholder text in the inputs with "Mary Smith" and "Mary".

My demographic is skewed to be about 70% female hence the female name example.

Exactly, but you can try to default the second one (using the same algorithm you’d use to generate “first name” unreliably).

And then there's sometimes a need for a "sort name" value. When I have upstream data consisting of separate first name and last name fields, my function to generate a sort name is to concatenate last name and first name, and then keep only letters. That way, apostrophes, dashes, spaces, etc. don't influence sorting whatsoever.

It seems quite tricky to deduce a sort string when you're only storing full name and short name... should the user be asked to provide this?

Why wouldn't you just accept the entire thing as a Unicode string and use the culture-free Unicode Collation Algorithm?

I don't mean to ask about or promote any particular sort algorithm. Rather, I'm discussing the transformation of a name into a "sort string," which will then be sorted (the algorithm you mention being a fine choice for this) after said transformation. Given discrete first/last fields, the transformation I mentioned works well for my purposes, but if I didn't have those particular discrete fields (instead having full/short fields) then it would be quite difficult, likely needing the user to weigh in, which I think is an atypical UX.

Because then you are sorting by the first name, and most people in Europe/America do not expect list of names to be sorted like that.

So how do you withdraw the funds? Or do they sit in the online casino's site for you to put a bet on or something?

It sits in the online casino's site. Some sites require you to play through the bonus once, while others allow you to withdraw directly once you reach a certain balance. For the ones that require you to play through, I just play the bonus through low-volatility slots.

I have coded a tool to help record everything about your horses.

I have coded it to be as flexible as possible, so it works for all breeds and all disciplines.

I have collaborations with Racing Associations within Australia to provide the software to new owners of retired racehorses.

I am trying to expand to the USA via Texas and to the UK this year.

https://horserecords.info

Been living with horses for almost 20 years and I had no idea what an Agistment was (we call it "boarding" in the US).

I took a quick look. Did not see medication records or required tests (Coggin's etc.), but that may be different from country to country.

You can record Medication as an Medication event type or a Veterinary event type.

For required tests - you can create a custom Event Type called 'Coggins' and record that. Or there is a genetic test result section under the horse that you can record info.

You can also upload document for the tests you are taking.

There is also a Medication Task List feature. If you have a lot of horses that need meds - this allows you to check them off each day as they are done.

I developed this feature earlier this month but haven't publicised it yet as it is still being tested by the user who requested it.

Happy to have a chat - particularly about what USA users are looking for - just email me via === support at horserecords.info ====

Cheers!

But I have no horses :(

We have some for sale. :)