Wednesday, 7 December 2011

Yay, last assignment of the semester.

Having Complete the last programming assignment of this semester, I wonder what could be coming next.

Through these trials, I think most Computer science students have become better at coding and thinking accurately about practical problems. However, it's never going to be "enough" because the set of challenges are infinite and even though it's always those building blocks (eg. loops, recursion, types, parsing, data structures, algorithms), these sets themselves are infinite and subtle superficial changes in the problem lead to greatly different data structures and algorithms.

It's awe-inspiring.

I'm particularly happy with this assignment because it was really quite a group effort. I wasn't good at regular expressions, and this guy had studied it before. He taught me that, but he was also stuck on grammar rules. I figured those critical issues out (which were not even documented in assignment nor manuals), and we leapfrogged through to the finish line. I suspect either of us would have found it far less motivating and more troublesome if we did it alone.

That felt awesome and has defined a new standard/expectation of the software development process. I guess you make career decisions subconsciously then and there, whenever you are actually working on something challenging.

And soon, I will be doing the same in Singapore...

2 comments:

Samuel Poon said...

Congratulations on almost finishing your semester!

It is wonderful to be inspired about your studies. I am going through this as well in my current group project.

Eugene said...

Hey where did those anonymous comments go...

Blogger is acting weird today.

I said my definition of studies isn't fun enough to include this experience. I consider it AWESOME.

I can't say I learnt anything consciously from it.