2011 in recap

It's been precisely a year since my last post, so I guess it's time to make another one! I really wish there was a blogging platform with Google+ sharing controls. Wordpress has a great post editor but only supports public/private. Blogger has neither, and it still doesn't support paragraph tags. Google+ posts are too simple formatting-wise and aren't easily searchable. It's 2012, where's my perfect blogging software?

Time really does fly as you get older. At the beginning of 2011, I was still in school, living the life of an unhealthy grad student. May rolled around and I graduated. I slacked off for a few months and road tripped across the US to Seattle. It was surprisingly more fun than I imagined a road trip would be, but I'm not going to blog about it here. There are pictures on Facebook and Google+, for those of you that can see them.

I started work at Google on August 1st. Easy to remember, but I'll probably forget anyway. Life has gone by pretty quickly since then; I've almost been working for half a year! I definitely miss the copious amounts of free time and nap time that I had before, but I guess working makes me use my time more efficiently.

I definitely feel happier working. I can't quite explain why, but it certainly helps that Google treats its employees very well. I think taking better care of myself has put me in a better mental and physical state. Some parts of grad school were quite stressful at times, as my last post mentioned.

Unfortunately, my life just isn't that exciting where I have so much I want to say about it. I'm content with not being super exciting. What am I looking forward to in 2012? Hmm, hard to say. Releasing my first big change should be "interesting" to say the least. Since I'm approaching six months of work, I should take interview training so I can visit Purdue some time. Oh, and I guess that minor detail of potentially buying a condo. More on that later...maybe.

Oh, and have a new template. Wee.

A fork in the road

I think historically I've posted at the beginning of each summer with goals/plans, etc. Oops. I don't think I had a whole lot to say at the beginning of the summer anyway. Last year was pretty uneventful aside from OOPSLA, which I posted about. I don't think I'll be returning this year, unfortunately. There were only minor details like, oh, I got a summer internship at Google.

Okay, not so minor. I didn't have much to say on the topic, though, since I didn't know exactly what I'd be working on. I'm on the last week of my internship now and I still can't say what I'm working on. I'll just say that I can't be (much?) happier than the project assignment I have. If you combine this with the blog title, I'm sure you can tell the direction in which this is heading.

I'm nearing what appears to be a fork in the road that is my life. It "appears" to be a fork because, in reality, neither road is actually completely open. The first path is to stay in grad school until I get my PhD; the second is to leave grad school with an MS and go to work at Google. In order for me to stay in grad school, I have to pass my qualifier. The second part has proven more difficult than anything I've experienced in school so far. Obviously, to work at Google, I would need to get a job offer.

Staying in grad school has some benefits. Many PhDs work at Google, so the industry option is never eliminated; many compilers/PL people have PhDs, which is still my field of interest; a PhD is basically essentially for teaching. Of course, it's not without cons, either. Actually, I just have one big, big con right now and that's research. I was always unsure of how well I would adapt to a research environment. The answer so far has been, "not very well." The reasons range from finding many papers to be boring to not enjoying my research work. For the latter, I have nobody to blame but myself. My advisor is always open to other ideas. I just don't have any. This problem will only compound if I stay in grad school, since I'll have to produce a thesis.

As for Google, let's just say that if working there would be like my internship has been all the time, then it would be great. I don't think I really need to evangelize working at Google. As for leaving grad school for Google, there are definite cons. Starting a job will be the next big shift in lifestyle. In school, my schedule is very relaxed. Working pretty much blocks off most of my day every weekday, which I'm definitely not used to. Even if work is really fun, this has proved to be taxing. In addition, leaving grad school basically eliminates the option of ever getting a PhD. This is mainly problematic since most of the PL people I see at Google have PhDs. Most of these PhDs seem to get their expertise during school. I feel like I have gained no such knowledge so far and that learning this stuff while in school is optimal. I also just hate having options cut off from me, but I can get over that. Eventually.

So where does that leave me now? If I'm "lucky" then the decision will be made for me. Otherwise I have lots of introspection to do. I think if I can successfully steer my research career in a direction that I enjoy, I may stay in grad school. I'm not optimistic about this, but there's no way I'll feel good about the decision if I don't try.

My first conference: OOPSLA 2009

As my professor graciously offered expense coverage to attend OOPSLA, several of my peers and I made it down as student volunteers. This is my first conference experience, hosted at Disney World's Contemporary World Resort. We arrived late Saturday night, and the program began the next morning with a joyfully early meeting at 7. So far it's been a good experience, but it's also been exhausting to continually wake up "early" (regular time for you working folks, I suppose). I ended up sleeping at 9:30 on Sunday, since I was so tired. I'm pretty sure I haven't done that in very many years. Since this post has gotten quite long, I'll be backposting a separate post for each day.

A milestone in graduate life

Not much content here. Just documenting the fact that I got my first paper accepted at a conference last week. Not a super prestigious conference or awesome paper, but happy all the same, especially since it's my first attempt. I may get to go to Madrid as a result, since my partner has an expired visa.

While I'm here, I got back a little over a week ago from my first grad summer school, which is more like a conference than undergrad summer school – seems I have to explain this to everyone. It was pretty fun, aside from the terrible 100+ degree weather with no air conditioning in the dorms. Fortunately, it only lasted a few days. Lots of cool people there and some good lectures, though some were a bit over my head. I got accepted as a student volunteer for OOPSLA too, so I may be going to that (in Disney World!), and I'm flying down to Orlando for a meeting with people at UCF as well.

More time, more problems

It's that time of year again; summer has just begun, so it's time to make a list of things that might be interesting to do so I don't get bored out of my mind (mostly a list so I don't forget things). My first year as a PhD student has gone by somewhat uneventfully. I think I've passed my qualifiers, but this semester's batch has yet to be seen. I've been getting this weird, nostalgic feeling with more friends graduating and leaving Purdue. It's like those sports movies when the coach at the end is being all emo when he's shutting off the stadium lights. Awesome, right?

The only definitive thing I'll be doing this summer so far is research. Not something terribly interesting at the moment, but I'll probably be getting paid as a summer RA (that's research, not resident). This probably means I'll be working towards a workshop paper, but who knows. Hopefully my partner will be around, because the stuff we're doing now is a drag. I'll be going to a week-long summer school in Oregon, as well. The topic is virtual machine/compiler implementation, so I'm looking forward to it.

Summer is when I get all of my recreational reading done. By recreational reading, I mean anything not school related, be it fiction or technical. I finished the Sword of Truth series last summer, and it was great, aside from the poor print quality of the books I got. Possible options:

1. A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin. Looks to be shorter than the Wheel of Time series. Plus, I already read the first WoT book, and would rather try something else before returning to it. I intend to read at least the first book in this series.
2. Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. Probably won't get around to these, but I don't have much else on my list of fantasy fiction.
3. Real World Haskell. Enter nerd books. I've read a few chapters into it already, but it's a big book. It's interesting so far, but I certainly haven't reached the part where I would call my Haskell knowledge "real world."
4. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. I bought this book awhile ago and never got past the preface. Maybe I can get past it this summer.

I always want to do some recreational programming over the summer, but I end up getting lazy. Nevertheless, a possible list of things to work on:

1. Mercurial. Specifically, hgsubversion. I originally applied to do this for Google's Summer of Code, but got turned down. Still, this project is interesting to me, since many people have no interest in learning Mercurial, leaving us stuck with Subversion. Progress on this would let me avoid Subversion. I've already submitted some minor patches during the school year, but I'd like to contribute something significant if I could.
2. Luke's BookLi.st project. A fairly interesting Django application. Not sure what I would do; API functionality would be an idea to implement, but probably wouldn't be a very large project.
3. Personal website in Django. This is obligatory; I think I post this every summer. I always dream up designs in my head, but am not graphically-talented enough to really materialize them. I'd still like to get one up, someday. Maybe it would motivate me to blog more, somehow.
4. Miscellaneous billion-dollar web startup idea. Yeah.
5. Game programming. I've grown somewhat weary of the idea of game programming, but will nevertheless be revisiting it with a few others. Some of the others have experience in this area, so it may be less tedious. I wish I knew graphics people.
6. IRC client. Kind of a dead horse, but I'm not really satisfied with any Windows IRC clients. This would end up being a cross-platform (Python) engine with a Windows-only (WPF) GUI built on top of it. Yeah, I could easily use a cross-platform toolkit. No, I won't. This also adds the limitation that the engine has to run on IronPython as well as CPython, which means Twisted is out. Could be interesting if this got anywhere. Big if.

If I had more things on the list, I guess I've already forgotten them. Knowing me, I'm forgetting something big. Hopefully I'll get things done this summer (I say this every summer, don't I?) and have more to write about. It's kind of sad that the few people from Purdue CS I knew blogged have all stopped, myself included. I guess we've relegated our ideas to 140-character messages now.

Side note: If anyone wants to play Civilization IV, I'll be participating in a potentially slow-paced multiplayer game with a lot of newbies in it. If anyone is interested...

The saga continues...

Well, it's been almost 3 weeks since commencement; as usual, I've been in summer-time slacking mode. I'm still doing a bit of work, but most of my time has been allocated to playing games and sleeping. Hopefully I can come off this habitual productivity death (don't I say this every summer?). Of course, I have goals, but they're farfetched as always, given my work ethic.

Last summer was mostly spent looking at Pylons as a Python web framework; Bennett and I started a project that progressed at a reasonable pace until school resumed. After awhile, I started looking at Django again, so hopefully I can come up with a good project idea that would use it. Since my last experiments with Django, they've made some great progress in development, as well as the release of a new book, which is a good reference; something I feel that Pylons never really had.

I have a few project ideas in mind, but they're all personal. I'm more or less hoping some others will be interested in some sort of group project (and have ideas!); unfortunately, most of my friends are starting "real life" mid-summer at their jobs all over the country, so I don't know how feasible this will be.

Django aside, I feel like it might be time to learn another language—Erlang is a possibility, but at this point I'm thinking that JavaScript is a good candidate. It's in the theme of web development (I guess you could argue that Erlang is too), and isn't something I've touched since middle school. Undoubtedly JavaScript would be much easier to learn than Erlang, so maybe restricting myself to one language is not a good idea. Suggestions are welcome.

Getting away from web development, shaim is still up in the air as to if I'll start working on it again. An IRC plugin is scheduled for the 0.5 milestone, and since I've made IRC clients before, this would be my area of expertise. What I really need to do is manage my time (stop playing games), but I don't foresee that occurring—at least not completely.

I also get to introduce one of my brothers to C this summer—as the next family member in line to go into Computer Science, he's one of the programmers for the high school's robotics team. This will be interesting, given that I've been so used to teaching Java (and hence gotten used to programming in Java, not C). I was just going to throw K&R at him, but I can't seem to find my copy.

Researchy type things are still ongoing; the same stuff as this last semester. Professor Vitek is out of the country for the entire summer, so I'm kind of on my own as far as real-time Java goes (P.S., I got a free Macbook Pro), but I hope to make more progress than I did during the semester, without any class obligations. I've nearly completed the labs for the new class, currently offered as CS180M, but subject to change. It will be interesting to see how multicore programming will pan out for freshmen; I would like to see how I would have fared in such a course. Of course, now something like that would be a cinch (given that I'm writing the labs).

I'm also apparently under obligation to be flying around again this summer to visit people. I haven't quite made a schedule for it yet, since I am technically working already, but I guess the unnamed will drown in a cup of sorrow if I don't fly out.

Next semester should be interesting. I decided my schedule with Professor Vitek before he left, and it looks like I'll be taking:

1. CS580 - Algorithms (Frederickson)
2. CS565 - Programming Languages (Vitek)
3. CS591C - Research Seminar (Various)
4. CS590V - Principles of Programming Languages

The first two have qualifiers, which will probably suck a lot. As someone who's gotten away with not studying for exams (predominantly), qualifiers will probably destroy the notion of me getting away with laziness. These next years will be quite an adventure.

Next time, a blog post at request of a future Purdue student.

This week in life

Here I am again, with no motivation to think of a real title, due to peer pressure of a certain jerkasaurus rex (jerkasaura regina?). Thus, I present an update on recent happenings in a disjoint, sloppily written fashion.

Last Monday, Purdue sent me an offer of support and admission to the Ph.D program in Computer Science. Exciting, but this is only the beginning of responses. Hopefully Purdue isn't the last university that responds positively. They gave me a fairly short notice of a fellowship that I should apply to, which is due on the 31st, so I guess I have to work on that. Recent weather, apparently reaching double digit negatives, is not positively influencing my opinion of Purdue. Not it's weather, anyway.

One of old friends (makes me feel old just saying that) is coming up to Purdue to visit, since he applied to Purdue for grad school, as well. It could be interesting if we both ended up here, since we used to be best friends before I moved across the States.

I had a meeting two Mondays ago to discuss the course I'm helping design. It was interesting, but will probably be quite a bit of work. I'm still in vacation mode, since I just turned in my first homework on Friday, which will be a problem if it continues for much longer.

I also met with Professor Vitek, who's supervising my honors research project, to talk about what I would be doing. I agreed to read some relating to RTSJ, which will probably end up being my research project (sorry, Luke). This will probably be a challenging topic, since James and I didn't really do so well on the RTSJ project we had in our programming languages class.

I'm also juggling way too many games for my own good, at this point. In addition to playing Materia Magica again, James has convinced me to start playing Freestyle Basketball again. Archspace also re-opened as Magellan Wars, which I used to play a lot. Hopefully I won't play too much this time, since the playerbase has dwindled dramatically. I also started a Travian account today, a game that Phil ahd been telling me back. I think it looks like a graphical Utopia, which makes it better than Utopia already. The cherry on top is that Mabinogi, my favorite Korean MMO, is opening at the end of this month for closed beta in English. James and I played the game in Korean, which, as you could imagine, was somewhat limiting, but it could be more fun this time around. Hopefully we get in. It's also kind of sad that my biggest paragraph is about computer games.

Realistically speaking, unless I stop playing games (with your heart, playing games with your heart~), I probably won't have much spare time for recreational programming. I have no ideas that would involve Django programming, but I have been tossing around ideas for a C# IRC library again for shaim. Pun intended. I've looked into other libraries, particularly SmartIrc4Net, but I don't know if I really like it.

I think that accurately summarizes how I haven't been doing much.

P.S. Dear Google, please re-evaluate your Blogger shortcuts. Ctrl-shift-arrow is commonly used to select words, but I can't do it anymore because ctrl-shift changes to preview mode.