fuzzy grad student
With an intelligently rambunctious second-grader, a trouble-seeking one-year-old, a full-time job, a book to promote, and another book to write, I’d have to be stupid to take on anything else, right?
Heh.
Now I’m a fuzzy grad student, too. (The terminology comes from my old undergrad days, when we’d universally refer to all the masters / doctoral crowd, regardless of facial hair situation or even gender, as “fuzzy grad students.”) How did this happen?
Two things kind of led up to this foolishness. The first was Ackermann’s function, a programming rite of passage I’d decided to take a particularly strange whack at. It’s easy enough to do in Ruby, my favorite programming language, but—and here’s the teeth-gritting part—I insisted on doing it in a certain strange way, implementing language features Ruby was never meant to have.
Tilting at this windmill led to all sorts of mental bookkeeping about a single piece of code meaning different things in different contexts. “I’ve heard this stuff before,” says I, “from professional computer scientists. Maybe I should talk to some of those.”
The other thing that led me down this road was that a bunch of my co-workers got their OMSE (Oregon Master of Software Engineering) certificates, a kind of professional-track alternative to a traditional comp-sci master’s degree. They were beaming, of course, but also spoke coherently and specifically about what they got from the program.
I don’t think the OMSE is for me. There seems to be a lot of focus on doing anything but writing great programs. For example, there are a lot of courses in engineering budgets, time estimates, project management, bug tracking, and so on. All worthwhile endeavors, to be sure. But the gaps in my knowledge are in the egg-headed arena of context and meaning.
So I’m dipping my toes into the water and taking a few traditional master’s-level classes at Portland State, starting right smack dab in the middle of the gaping void with the Theory of Computation. The ink dried on the last of our final exams last week. I’ll let you know how it went.
In the meantime, a bunch of my half-assed experiments will probably show up from time to time on this blog. They will probably share the dual fault of being inscrutable to non-programmers and absurdly simple to experienced programmers. C’est la vie….