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Songhay Studio: Mathematica Online and Markdown instead of Word (in Visual Studio)

Mathematica Online?

As long as I am held captive as an employee in a cold, noisy, germ-infested office (with questionable drinking water), the time might be right to upgrade my Mathematica license to what is called “Premier Service Plus for Mathematica” or “Personal License Service Plus.” This move should change my life in the same manner that working from Azure VMs changed my life. (I also notice that this service includes “complimentary updates and upgrades”—which suggests to me that I do not have to charge up 100 bucks for the latest upgrade of Mathematica.) This looks like it’s going to be 225 bucks—which almost feels like buying the Home Edition of Mathematica every year.

Markdown instead of Word (in Visual Studio)

When I am doing work-for-hire in the enterprise, I’ve developed the thoughtful habit of writing documentation in a Word file and checking it in to source control. I write documentation in Word proactively: rarely is it a requirement. This is friendly for most IT employees over 40 but, in the age of GitHub, I see an opportunity to make a slightly disruptive change. Instead of Word by default, I should always start with a README.md file—which could lead to more documentation (on SharePoint perhaps).

What might be ironic comes from the temptation to bundle a bunch of Markdown files in, say, a ZIP file to bundle documentation to check into source control. This Markdown ZIP bundling would be exactly what is going on in a .DOCX Open XML file.

https://github.com/BryanWilhite/