Very surprising that a few are passing judgement, although there is no thesis in the article!, how would someone judge without actually reading a thesis?

It can be done, there are many people out there who did part-time PhDs in similar situations. Shame to see some claiming it can't be done or impossible!

Typical one-size-fit-all judgement, bigotry, similar to making a statement like 'All VW cars are polluting'!

> This isn't a UK PhD, at least it's not up to the standard of any rational UK PhD I've ever seen.

How do you judge without reading the thesis?, there is no thesis in the article.

> No one can do a part-time PhD; it's just so much work

You can't generalise, not everyone is the same, some people have the capacity and capability to put all in. There are part-time PhDs and there are many people who completed part-time PhDs whilst working full-time. Oxford University and many others top institutions offer part-time PhDs, it's possible and doable https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate/courses/part-time-a...

> PhD with basically no research with one publication Publications usually take a while to get through the review process, many be there are many in the pipeline, how do you know?

> Looking at his thesis and publication he's done none of the above.

There is no thesis in the article!, it's very hard to judge without reading the thesis.

> A US PhD is like a UK PhD plus a postdoc No comment, I'm quite sure this debate has taken place in many forums https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-compare-pursuing-a-PhD-in-E...

And of course if you have to attend classes, it will be difficult doing it part-time.

> Being around them will make you much smarter and more capable in ways that are intangible but obvious in retrospect.

As part time you can still meet those smart people at the university or by attending conferences.

I would guesstimate that 75%+ of the "value" of my PhD came from casually interacting with smart people (classmates, postdocs, profs) working on related topics.

These same people go to conferences, but they are busy there--they have talks to see, posters to visit, and friends/collaborators/funders to catch up with. In contrast, when you're "around", it's possible to muse and mull things over with the grad student waiting for her turn in the darkroom or the postdoc brewing coffee. "Hey, did you see this paper?" or "How do we know that <X>, anyway?"

I'd worry that a part-time student would miss out on a lot of these opportunities; by definition, they're around only part-time and most of that time is "business time."

>There is no thesis in the article!, it's very hard to judge without reading the thesis.

He's on google scholar. We can see his abstract, citations, and other publications. His website also lists his github.

That's more than enough to judge his productivity.

>As part time you can still meet those smart people at the university or by attending conferences.

Conferences are very clique-y. If you are just some shmuck showing up off the street you're not going to be able to get access to those smart people.

Hell, I have all the relevant credentials and still get shut out of conversations at conferences.

I think the problem I'm reading in the comments that Lambdas have a 1.5 GB max memory, which is a constraint for some use-cases

I may have derailed my comment a bit by mentioning lambda. My point was more about separating work from machines, which Lambda helps with, but you can also do on your own.

BigQuery is well and truly amazing, zero upfront setup or infrastructure. You ur Query & BigQuery that is it

I agree, most of it is accumulation over the years

It's not just accumulation. IMHO, the features of Google Cloud are better thought out.

Two examples of things that rock: - Being able to pop up an ssh shell right from your browser - Google Cloud shell. A free Linux shell in the sky with a bunch of dev tools pre-installed (including docker)

Very structured and lots of meaningful analogies. I didn't know that AWS had so many storage services!. And you are right AWS console feels like a marketing dashboard, so far I've only ever clicked on 3 icons, never looked at the other 30 or so