Through secondary school I loved all of the subjects. But inevitably, there were days where homework was not what I felt like doing. On these days, I found myself using homework from one subject to avoid the homework from another. Math would trump Spanish, and Spanish would pummel English. While eventually it all was all complete, I enjoyed watching as my interests became apparent in my decisions.

Despite avoiding my English homework, I really did enjoy the class. I loved reading books like The Kite Runner, Reservation Blues, and We. Speaking of which, if you haven’t read We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, I highly recommend it. It’s a dystopian future novel commenting on the Russian revolutions of the early twentieth century (We predated 1984, Brave New World, more well known books in the genre).

I feel fortunate to have enjoyed my classes and my schooling in general. And beyond just school, I am most grateful that I love learning.

When it was time for me to start deciding what my academic focus would be in college, I knew the most important factor would be that the subject would continue to evolve and generate more information for me to learn.

Always be learning.

Ideally, work would mix constrained and unconstrained problems, forcing me to think creatively both in a small problem space and when confronted with a blank canvas. So I found computer science and economics.

Found isn’t the right word; these were the two fields that I spent the most time outside of school learning about. They also shaped some of the electives I took, Introduction to Programming and Introduction to Computer Science, and what I would focus on when I had more flexible homework assignments.

Learning is at the heart of computer science and economics. As the fields grow, researchers discover more applications of their work affecting many other fields. For me, I find both of these fields the most interesting when they are applied to other research areas - but especially so when applied to each other.

This past January, I read a collection of essays on open source software development entitled The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond (ESR). Named after the essay of the same name, his essays contrast two models of software development: proprietary (cathedral) and open source (bazaar). In many of his essays, ESR dives into the economics of software. Software is fundamentally different than most other products sold on the market. Software can have a high development cost, but will cost close to nothing to reproduce. Some software is even incredibly cheap to develop. Think of the number of weekend projects that make it into the App Store, which Apple is cracking down on.

Economics is all about making decisions while facing constraints. Money, time, memory, clock cycles, economic growth, latency, storage costs - don’t forget about gravity! Economic modeling starts with generating realistic constraints that ultimately determine the accuracy of your predictions.

Economics and computer science are not actually that different from each other.

The best thing about both of these fields is that they change the way you think. Tyler Cowen explains in An Economist Gets Lunch why food quality in the US decreased during prohibition and why great barbecue restaurants also serve excellent breakfasts. In The UNIX Philosophy, Mike Gancarz draws upon Ken Thompson and others to distill nine essential key points for adherents to the Unix philosophy.

1. Small is beautiful.
2. Make each program do one thing well.
3. Build a prototype as soon as possible.
4. Choose portability over efficiency.
5. Store data in flat text files.
6. Use software leverage to your advantage.
7. Use shell scripts to increase leverage and portability.
8. Avoid captive user interfaces.
9. Make every program a filter.

Each of these precepts influences the way I approach problems, both in software development and in my day-to-day life.

This is the power of economics and computer science: both affect the way I think about and approach problems.

To close, here are three key points from the How To Become a Hacker appendix to ESR’s Cathedral. I argue that these ideas are ingrained in economists and computer scientists alike. They are also what excite me most about my future in both of these fields.

• The World Is Full of Fascinating Problems Waiting To Be Solved
• Nobody Should Ever Have To Solve A Problem Twice
• Boredom And Drudgery Are Evil

Always be learning.