I’ve decided it will be good for me if I can sit down once a week and try to write about a problem I had to solve that week, either in my daily life or working on a project.

The biggest problem for this week was actually making myself sit down and write something on here.  I don’t think that would be very interesting to readers or my future self so I’ll fore go the discussion of that.

I think the first thing I should do is explain my background.  I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of South Carolina (USC) working in the ARENA for Research on Emerging Networks and Applications (ARENA) lab.  Here I focus on developing new wireless network protocols in an endless quest to publish papers.  I have been with Dr. Srihari Nelakuditi since about 2004, when he hired me as an undergraduate researcher.  We have presented multiple papers together.  One was presented at MobiCom and can be found in the Mobile Computer Communications Review (MCCR), it is on security in Mobile Ad Hoc NETworks (MANETs).  Another notable paper was presented at the WiMesh workshop 2008 at SECON, it is not yet available online and focused on bit-rate selection in oppotunistic routing.  The second paper was also the focus of my Master’s Thesis.

During my time as a student at USC, I have worked on quite a few side projects.  Some of these were related to school and some could be seen as distractions.  I spent some time doing contract work on a health-care data system for a director of marketing of a contract company for nursing homes.  I have since used my experience in this field to try to create a large scale public web application providing similar information.  The project is being developed in Ruby on Rails, my first large scale project using the framework.  I have been very happy with it for the most part, and I hope that I can provide some useful insight into problems I have faced while programming with it.

During this Summer of 2008, though, I took a break and had a tour at a nameless agency in the Maryland area doing computer science research .   This was very fun, but nonetheless the day to day government work motivated me even further to pursue my goal of having my own business.  I know (and am told very frequently) that this is a pipe dream and every young computer scientist wants to have their own company, but I feel like I have the motivation and drive to bring a reasonable idea to fruition.  If the completion of my plans does not bring any type of success then I will simply move on.  The key point is that I do plan to have an operational business before deciding that it is not successful.  I believe this is the reason most technical start-ups fail.  They don’t realize how much work is involved in creating their envisioned product.

I have also spent some time while at school developing games.  See, this was my first love with computers.  I fully expected to be a video game developer by the time I graduated college.  There are multiple things that changed my mind about this goal.  The first is that I feel like the industry has totally changed.  This might be due to many reasons.  My observations lead me to believe it is a combination of the following

1. The large emerging market of the casual gamer, usually on a console.
2. Companies like EA buying up every company they can and losing all creativity in their games for the sake of optimization.
3. The failing PC market for games, which prevents the small developers from getting a market unless they can get their game on one of the major consoles.

So, I feel like the video game market is no longer somewhere I would like to work, besides a select few companies.  The competition for getting into the industry is enormous.  I feel like I could find a very enjoyable job in normal software development that pays much better, has less stress, and does not require me to do a little dance for the hiring guys culling through hundreds of potential code monkeys.  Regardless, I still took a game development class this past semester.  Despite having a five person team, it ended up giving me much needed experience with slack teammates.  I’ve had slack teammates before, but most of the time it was because they were either incapable of creating decent code, or they just didn’t care about school in general.  This graduate class was different though, in that my teammates were perfectly capable of accomplishing what I tasked them with.  I believe that the problem was that they saw that I was also capable of doing it myself, so any work they didn’t finish was not going to cause them to get a bad grade.  The class ended well, our game turned out OK, but the team was very unsatisfied with themselves for being so uninvolved during the semester.  I’m generalizing about their lack of work, not every team member was horrible, I can think of two that I would have given F’s to though.

If you’ve read this far, you might have noticed something about the way I write and think.  I move very quickly from one topic to the next.  I often find myself talking and something comes up in my head and it seems like it would be more time efficient to talk about that instead so I simply move to that topic without a very smooth transition.  I’m afraid if I simply free write that is how it will turn out.  If I’m writing a technical article, I can rewrite it as many times as I need to.  So there will probably be two different types of writing on this blog.

Thank you for reading.  In my next post I am hoping to go over some problems I have faced in Rails and my current solutions to the problems.  Hopefully I can get some feedback and maybe make some improvements.

-Chase