Chan's Personal Blog

Well, I am now officially half way done my Master's degree. Ten months down, ten more to go. I think it's safe to say that the feeling has finally set in, and I feel like a grad student. Usually it takes me a while before something like this seems real.

I think one of the most valuable things that I'm learning ironically isn't things related to computer science, but rather public speaking and writing. Most of the courses I take typically involve doing some research on a topic, writing a paper about it, and sharing the results in a presentation.

Well, today I did 11 hours worth of programming for work and school, and I just got home, and boy am I tired. You should have seen me at around 11:00pm tonight, I was fairly incoherent. I did manage to sneak in a quick 20 minute dinner in between the coding as well, so at least I wasn't starving, unlike my partner.

Anyways, this entire week we've been fighting an assignment for a compilers course. What made it difficult was that the requirements were very vague, and there was a lot of unfamiliar code to look through, most of which was autogenerated which meant it was not documented very well. The weekly briefing we got about the assignment was largely unhelpful as well.

In either case, we didn't finish the assignment. The assignment is due tomorrow, and honestly, we've stopped caring. It's worth only 3%, and I've got midterms to cram for.

I did however come up with a brilliant plan about how to tackle the assignment AFTER we stopped caring. We probably could have worked a lot faster if we used an IDE like Eclipse for the assignment. I love VI and everything, but it's a pain having to look up object definitions when you've got 50+ classes. I tend to resist using IDEs, but we might have finished the assignment faster if we had used one.

Oh well, live and learn... time for bed.