31–40 of 85 posts
Knowing what goes into a Ph.D. is invaluable in making such a decision, and this book was quite helpful in that regard. Thank you!
whoa i'm astonished people have the attention span to read this on a friday night :) here's an HTML version too ... http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm
Wow, I can't believe I just read that whole thing. Maybe it was the excellent writing quality or maybe I just find things like this interesting. As someone who just graduated with a B.S. in chemical engineering and will start work toward my PhD in the fall (also in chemical engineering, but will actually involve a TON of programming), this strikes a chord with me. A few takeaways from the article: -The author does no…
I don't know whether that's the convention in your field (or with your advisor), so I don't want to make any generalizations. It's certainly possible to graduate with one big idea -> single paper, but that's just not what I ended up doing.
I read this in its entirety, unable to go to bed before finishing. This is amazing. I'll admit that I started out with skepticism towards Philip's initial research goals.
Instead what I found is an application of immense talent , culminating in software projects that are nothing short of amazing. For what it's worth, something like CDE seems like a holy grail in many scenarios. I've spent some time time thinking about distibuted cluster management software (Google's borg, MS auto-pilot, Hadoop YARN) and the problems these system tend to run into when encountering stateful services. Naturally, I'll spend a bit of time reading up CDE after this.
As Xcelerate said it's quite obvious that the author is _nowhere_ close to average, even in a top-tier program like Stanford. I also admire is that the author was able to maintain this healthy degree of self-deprecation while still doing the inherently (to a research or developer) distasteful but vital work of selling.
Many of my team mates at my current and previous jobs hold PhD. I come from an academic family: my dad was a full professor (e.g., habitulation et al) in our home country, my mom completed her PhD dissertation but wasn't allowed to defend for reasons best answered by a Google search[1]. However, this writeup still shocked me in many ways (the sheer grit and tenacity required on top of extreme mental horsepower). Thank you for sharing this.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=jews%20in%20soviet%20univers...
Edit: one _tiny_ suggestion -- pgbovine, I like how you've planned for the book to be accessible to those outside of computer science/software engineering fields (e.g., explaining what device drivers, Python, et al were). That said, I still think there are a few pieces that could be improved in terms of the paper's accessibility to non-CS folks: going into more details into potential sources of bugs (to explain the motivation behind your initial research), the full pain of systems' environment management, etc... You should definitely publish this for a wide audience (at the very least gearing this for students or professionals in all natural sciences and other quantitative fields).
"He was an ardent pragmatist who cared more about achieving compelling results than demonstrating theoretical 'interestingness'..." Are those people actually rare in academia?
Off topic, but I chuckled as I'm interning at Microsoft this summer and actually came across a paper on Klee this last week as I was doing research to guide my own testing project. I did a double-take when I saw the name.
Thanks for writing this.