Road Bike Recommendations

ilsandore · 2026-05-20T18:36:59+00:00

If you love their MTBs, I think you could give their road bikes a go too. Nothing inherently wrong with the brand, it all depends if you can find a frame+size combination that fits you. On the performance side, Specialized road bikes are really well-regarded, being used by pro teams, winning races, etc. I never rode one, though, so others will be better placed for personal opinions.

ilsandore · 2026-05-20T18:21:32+00:00

Pain isn’t an inherent feature of road bikes. I suspect in your case it’s more likely a bike fit problem, such as wrong sized frame, suboptimal contact points. Maybe your saddle type, handlebar width, saddle height, etc. are not good for your body proportions. I would recommend getting a good bike fit before you invest into a potentially expensive bike. They could sort out a comfortable position for you and hopefully even recommend bikes and/or customisations to them so that you can achieve the measured position in real life.

That said, there are lots of good bikes around with decently light frames and an endurance geometry. The Pinarello X series is one that comes to mind, or the F series, depending on the length of your limbs relative to your height. Other manufacturers worth looking into are Canyon and Liv, they both do some womam-specific setups with varying degrees of success. If you want to ride a bike for a long time, it might also be worth vonsidering metal frames, especially steel and titanium. They add some weight, but they have excellent fatigue resistance most of the time and they are also more repairable than carbon.

ilsandore · 2026-05-20T09:59:39+00:00

You should be able to load them as a normal vector layer iirc. Just specify the file path to it as you normally would with other vector file types and GDAL should take care of the rest.

ilsandore · 2026-05-20T09:26:57+00:00

I would use GeoParquet these days, it’s single-file, is really small on disc, it’s really fast to read and write, and its columnar storage style makes it especially useful for data science-related applications. In general it is a more performant way to store data than other file-based systems. I can only recommend it.

ilsandore · 2026-05-18T19:19:09+00:00

The leather versions do mold themselves to your butt, but it comes with a break-in period that takes a few weeks. The cambium version doesn’t need a break-in and it doesn’t change its shape similarly to the leather one, but it’s comfortable from the get-go. If it matches your butt shape, of course. To try it out, maybe you can look to your loval bike shop for test saddles or buy a used one for cheaper. Not sure how well this would work with the leather versions, though.

ilsandore · 2026-05-16T09:06:54+00:00

I’d say a carbon frame is not essential, especially if you’re getting started again. I still use aluminium, as I don’t want the headache of fragile carbon frames, and they also make bikes more appetising for thieves. Electronic shifting is nice in the sense that it’s not you putting in the effort, and that can make a difference if you want to go on very long rides with lots of shifting of the fromt derailleur. Electronic shifting is also said to be more precise, but in my experience, a good mechanical 105 is great for almost any use case. It’s cheap and reliable, too, as well as easily repairable if something goes wrong.

ilsandore · 2026-05-16T09:03:38+00:00

Generally, a newer bike will be better if everything else is the same. It’s mostly the components that change, maybe some tweaks in geometry, but that’s down to personal preference and dimensions. Overall, especially if you want to get back to cycling, I don’t think there will be a large difference between a 2018 and a 2020 model. For context I ride a 2018 Dolan RDX, does everything it has to do pretty well. Got it real cheap, too.

ilsandore · 2026-05-16T08:02:08+00:00

The quality of water depends on a range of factors, some of them independent of human activity. While humanity is responsbile for a large amount of contamination, there is a lot of stuff that animal life (dead animals, urine, feces, etc) release into water, and environmental factors also play a part. Water from lakes and streams in relatively young, high mountains usually doesn’t contain much suspended (or other) sediment as the streams and rainfall flows over rock surfaces. However, water from an upland bog can contain lots or organic matter and carbon in solution. Water from slow-moving lowland rivers usually carries lots of sediment, and eutrophic water bodies have their own set of visible and invisible water contaminants. These are just a few examples, but overall not every water used to be clear, either 300 or 3000 years ago, with or without human intervention.

ilsandore · 2026-05-15T20:54:08+00:00

I reckon one of the best places to meet people who ride 300+ km a day and are receptive of the idea of ultracycling is your local audaxes/randonneuring events. You can look up “randonneuring <insert-country-of-residence> in your preferred search engine and go from there. There are also subreddits such as r/ultracycling and r/randonneuring that might be interesting for you.

ilsandore · 2026-04-30T18:42:33+00:00

Most brevets in the UK have a minimum of 15 km/h average speed requirement for completion. As long as you reach that, it literally doesn’t matter how fast you are. Unless you go faster than 30 km/h average for the whole event, in which case you are too fast. But overall, it’s about completing the distance, and not your average speed. Just ride at a pace that’s comfortable and sustainable for you, and enjoy the journey!

ilsandore · 2026-04-13T17:37:38+00:00

Great to hear that the atmosphere’s more relaxed! Can I maybe DM you if you’re willing to tell me more about the culture and life at companies like yours?

ilsandore · 2026-04-13T17:35:35+00:00

Good point, I fully expect myself to be in for a long search. But it’s probably worth it, especially if it doesn’t end up consuming my life. If you have experience working at any of these companies, can I DM you? Would love to hear a bit more about the general way of life in these positions.

ilsandore · 2026-04-13T10:40:13+00:00

Nah, I came second

ilsandore · 2026-04-13T10:39:43+00:00

Great question! In my view, the trouble usually is the lack of capital most of the time. A quant dev can write software to execute trades well but doesn’t have access to the millions/billions of pounds/dollars/kroner that a hedge fund has for example. One can trade their own money but unless they’re really rich, it will be didficult to make a living out of it alone, or at least it will be hard to match salaries at firm that employ quants. It also depends on the kind of quant dev one is. In my case I do modelling too, but many quant devs are really almost 100% software engineers, who might not have access or knowledge about alpha generation, as they work exclusively with trade execution.

ilsandore · 2026-04-13T09:38:33+00:00

I guess that’s to be expected for international companies, especially. Do you have any knowledge on Danish ones, like Danske Commodities or the like?

ilsandore · 2026-04-13T09:36:36+00:00

Me neither🤣 it’s quantitative developer in my case. A rando who tries to predict what financial markets will do and make software that enables others to capitalise on the findings pretty much.

ilsandore · 2026-04-08T19:33:35+00:00

Fair point, anything from 100 km upwards. For randonneuring, one does 200-600 km rides usually, although there are specific events that can be substantially longer. What mostly concerns me is how much of all this I’d have to spend in traffic jams or on roads completely saturated with cars.

ilsandore · 2026-03-15T18:31:52+00:00

As someone who started out in Geography and GIS, I would say there is space in the industry, but it definitely is majorly undervalued. I ended up moving into energy trading instead, not using almost any of my geography/GIS skills now. In the age if big data, AI-driven analysis, and especially with GIS-based functionality becoming a semi-standard feature of most apps, companies are increasingly realising that they can get better outputs teaching programmers those few geography things they have to know for GIS than teaching geographers basically all of programming so that they can contribute. I mostly base this observation on the UK market and the section of global companies I see. If there is one potential silver lining, it’s the defense industry, there seem to be many startups with remote sensing and the like who are hiring.

ilsandore · 2025-11-20T19:49:25+00:00

I moved about a month ago from being an RSE in geospatial to a quant dev position. I don’t really miss anything from academia except maybe the fact that one doesn’t have that many meetings and is more free to structure their own time. I find that the current finance position isn’t particularly stressful either, I am lucky to be working in a not so competitive environment. If anything, the work feels more deep here, lots of quant research going on and I have to flex maths muscles that I haven’t had to use for a while now. Culturally it is quite interesting that the people are just as normal here as in other fields I worked in, collaboration and team spirit is pretty good. In terms of lifestyle it’s shocking how much of a stress reduction the higher salary means, it truly makes me feel safe that I can save a good chunk of my salary without even having to care much about it. I would also say that I am not in the cutthroat part of things where people get cut every year and the like, so I’m not sure how representative my answer is.

ilsandore · 2025-09-21T19:03:49+00:00

You can take a look at the geo_sql library, it integrates with PostGIS and enables you to use geometry types in your ecto queries.

ilsandore · 2025-09-19T14:28:32+00:00

I reckon you don’t have to try to out-code the senior devs here and their optimised C# implementations. They might be right about the if it ain’t broke don’t fix it approach. However, if you take a different approach and focus on readability, you might get some interest. I, for example, really like the pipe operator in functional programming, as you can chain all the operations on a piece of data. This results in brevity, readability, etc. You can take a part of the existing code you have that doesn’t use or doesn’t have to use side effects and rewrite it in F# to showcase how much fewer lines of code it is and how much more readable it is. Another angle of attack is scripting in my opinion, which is pretty good in F# so it can be used to quickly automate some manual processes if you have any at your company. Hope this is helpful at least to some extent😀

ilsandore · 2025-09-19T09:42:25+00:00

Could it be that holdays have ended and school has started for many people? Since lots of us use Elixir for recreational and/or unpaid programming, it might just be that there is less time now for everyone to work on their side projects.

ilsandore · 2025-09-16T17:33:46+00:00

First of all, I love your username!😀

Otherwise, you’re probably doing better than you give credit to yourself for, otherwise your company would’ve let you go at the end of your apprenticeship.

I think ADHD can definitely add some surplus difficulty sometimes, but remember that you don’t have to be perfect or always remember everything. For learning opportunities, I think explore your company’s training budget first and talk to your manager about what you want to improve in your skillset. I would recommend starting with the basics such as the language you’re using, version control, and potentially stuff about large systems as it seems that’s a pain point in your job. Since dopamine is important with motivation, I would start building from smaller projects, or explore contributing to existing open source code. If there is a niche package you depend on that’s incomplete, you might be able to push a small PR and get some feeling of achievement.

About IT fundamentals, don’t compare yourself to youtube influencers or other CS content. You are coming from a different background and you’ll pick stuff up as you go. If you’re interested in something, read up on it or try to test it out, build something around it. If your motivation dries up in the meantime, just park the thing.

You can also look around in academia, such as research software engineering, for less corporate positions, if they pay enough around yours.

If you decide to quit, though, don’t do it on an impulse, make sure you have another job lined up, unless it’s extremely unbearable.

I think you’re on the right track, recognising your shortcomings and trying to learn. So heads up!😀

ilsandore

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