71–80 of 85 posts
"One possible reason I dreaded was that nobody had previously built something like CDE because it was impossible to get the details right to make it work e ffectively in practice. Maybe it was one of those ideas that looked good on paper but wasn't practically feasible" No, there was autopackage, alien and any numerous other programs and battles/discussion long email threads that worked not just for python but for an…
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
I actually chuckled during some of those early chapters... "It takes 4 weeks to write a good paper." Followed later by, "We ended up submitting an embarrassing jumble of text filled with typos, nonsensical sentence fragments, graphics without any explanations, and no concluding paragraphs. It was a horrid mess." It's even funnier when something like that gets accepted (or the really polished one gets rejected!).
I plan to send this to some of the more junior grad students I know!
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'm glad I'm not an academic
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
I am sitting at an airport on my way back from a top-tier conference and the Epilogue on Page 99 resonates so much with my own experiences. Thanks a lot for writing this :)
Another thought I had is whether you could implement this in pure Python using the introspection features of the language. Finally I was reminded how with certain languages such as Lisp, there is this notion of an "image", which is a dump of the state of the interpreter. Does that achieve the same end as this? If so, wouldn't that be a much more general solution?
I must confess, while the grad school parts resonated for me, the part that was most engaging was the vein of applied provenance tools. Having recently left my program (but enjoying research), I've actually been spending a huge amount of time planning out and slowly executing building a better tool chain for data analysis, and one of the really exciting details that has popped out of my design is a very nIce support…
thanks; this might be a presumptuous suggestion, but if you're interested in these topics, please take a look at my dissertation. at the very least, it's useful as a bibliography of work in this field ... http://pgbovine.net/projects/pubs/guo_phd_dissertation.pdf
I'm actually right now figuring out if I can align the stars so I can just support myself while working on this tool chain project of mine, but we really should chat in more detail at some point! (lets one of us get around to emailing the other in the near future)