CSEP504: second and last paper done
News, School ·Sunday March 14, 2010 @ 19:54 EDT (link)
My current course, CSEP 504, Advanced Topics in Software Systems, is over. Although it was billed as a course covering various software topics, including programming languages research, it actually ended up being a fairly run of the mill course in software architecture, and I'm glad it's over.
To start with, our professor missed a couple classes, one due to being at a conference in India, but he should have had someone cover. A few classes were taught by graduate students, so it was quite possible. When Dr. Notkin was present, he was an engaging teacher, although the classes seem to move rather excruciatingly slowly. For example, the lectures on tools: we all know about source control, and we can look up the Wikipedia pages on our own. I suppose I should have said something earlier, but after expressing a desire to examine "graduate" topics in the compilers course (vs. starting with the basics that "everyone" should have learned in undergrad, but apparently didn't, though no fault of the instructor whatsoever) and being told I was on the fringe, I had less confidence that one person is going to cause a foundational change in a class that (I thought at the time) had been mapped out well in advance (I'm rather inclined to adjust "well in advance" to "just before class time" now). But maybe I was thinking what we all were thinking.
Next, the grading was coarse-grained: 30% x 2 for two "state of the research" essays, 2% x 10 for 10 reports on papers from an assigned set on the course page, 10% participation (presumably in the online forums, since there's no way he knew everyone by sight, especially across the remote link to the Microsoft class), and another 10% was undecided (and he eventually decided to just give it to us, so I can't complain there). It was also nice not to have any exams, I suppose.
As the subject says, I just finished my second paper, 10 pages in ACM format (most students didn't follow the guidelines and just used the default Word style, with a 1.5-spaced 12 point font, making the ACM format effectively 2.5 multiplier in actual volume; sure, quality is important, but that's a lot of difference in amount of work). I am very glad to be done. My first paper was on Complex Event Processing (CEP) and my second was entitled "Market-Based Architectures" and examined a series of market and negotiation-based architectures, such as autonomic systems internally auctioning resources, or inter-agent trust and handling of proposals for work.
You'll like the course if you like to read (and report on or aggregate) papers, but I suggest you read papers on your own time and find courses in which you can learn new things. Personally I like courses with design or programming projects, such as the compilers course I had the previous quarter, which was a lot of fun. But I read a lot of papers—and learned a lot—in Accessibility, too, and that was interesting, so it's not just that I prefer to write code. Don't take this course.
