Julie, Magda and the rest of the lab were out of town this week, so Jennifer and I were pretty independent. I did some of my writing for my paper at Seattle coffeeshops in the evenings and early mornings, which proved for some fun exploration. We also established a strikingly different direction for my project. More on that will be up on the website on Monday.
Landmark Events
New project direction: backward query processing for Lahar
UW Robotics Lab tours on Thursday afternoon
Website mostly up and running. Still needs some work, but I now have a very concrete To Do list for completion
Impressions
It was interesting being entirely independent this week. Admittedly, it felt a little lonely to not have Julie or Magda in the building, though everybody will be back next week which will be exciting. Jennifer and I chugged along in the DB lab, which switches daily from polar to warm temperature conditions.
Probably the biggest event this week I would like to discuss is the change in direction to my project. If you read the last 2 reports, you know that I was a bit frustrated with Audio Processing software. No progress was really being made, and I felt like I was contributing little to the lab. After doing a bit of soul searching, I realized that this was not just because the installations were difficult to deal with and occasionally buggy. I realized that I was also not passionate about my project. I felt like a bridge between other existing softwares, like I was not really contributing anything of worth.
I will definitely say that stepping up to discuss the issue (though by email at first) with Julie was a challenge for me. I feared backlash, that it would be too late to change my project, that there were not other options. She was very understanding and supportive, and took the initiative to help design a new project for me to work on (more on that when I finish my initial report for Monday). It was really a lesson in confidence for me. Had I confronted the issue earlier and gone with my gut instincts, we probably could have started the new project earlier.
If you are spending too much time on stuff that should be fairly straightforward, seek help.
This is probably one of my primary weaknesses, and something Dave had to chastise me about a number of times when we worked on the 399 in Spring Quarter. I have a tendency to stubbornly truck through tasks in an effort to master concepts on my own, rather than seeking out help for issues that turn out to be simple.
If the project direction does not feel right, speak up.
I sent a pretty detailed description to Julie about my concerns. I felt like I was just doing testing, and writing redundant code, and not really contributing to the lab. One of my main goals for this summer is to really offer something valuable to the lab and achieve a thorough learning process. I feel that one of the best ways to learn is to design something of your own. An algorithm, perhaps, or a process, and to see it through all of those rough spots and victories that evidently arise in software development. I realized I felt that was lacking, and attempted to change it rather than resigning myself to a summer of mild discomfort.
I am very excited about my new project. I will be working with backwards queries on Lahar. That is, determining the best direction to process an event query. I am still in the research stage for this and expect to finish my paper by Monday, so you can expect a much more detailed description then. Sorry to keep you in suspense!
Cheers for now!