The Last Lecture That Could Have Been Better

CS3216 was inspired by the The Last Lecture.

Just delivered what is likely my last lecture for CS3216. It is hard to describe the feeling. Strangely liberating is probably the best I can do.

In terms of delivery, it could probably have been better. I committed the elementary mistake of trying to cover too much ground. I shouldn't have made, but I did. >.< Ah well.

I guess it's hard to resist the temptation to try to tell students everything under the sun, including the meaning of life, when there's a nagging thought that this IS the last chance.

School is hardly the most efficient mechanism for learning and lecture is hardly the most effective way to have students learn.

My only consolation is that it is not likely that students would remember much of what happened tonight a couple of years down the road (which might also not be a consolation depending on how we look at it. >.<).

I guess my goal tonight is to provide students with some sense of the history and motivation of CS3216 together with an overview of the issues that I think matters. Most importantly, I wanted to pay tribute to the people who helped make CS3216 happen, especially long-suffering TA Kok Wee. :-)

In the spirit of walking the talk, I will also finish my final blog post for the semester tonight to summarize some of things I covered:

(i) The world today as we know it is broken. I believe that it is important for people to try to understand WHY the world come to be broken. My blame Wall Street, but that's too simplistic even I might not think much of bankers.

I really don't think that it's the fault of anyone in particular that caused the world to spiral into its current state. To me, it is really the consequence of what I believe are core structural issues, couple with many Prisoner-Dilemma-like situations, where people are naturally led to incentivized to do the "wrong" things.

I think it's important for students to think about social political issues from a higher-level because I think it helps to put things in perspective. We live in a world much better than ourselves and I think it matters to understand, without judgment. The social pyramid I described is not a matter of good or bad. It just is.

Human societies have always self-organized into social pyramids in one way or another. That is merely a function of life's penchant to be unfair.

Am I hoping that one of the students can make a difference and put things right? Truthfully, not really. Truth be told, I'm not entirely convinced that the inevitable decay that we see happening around us can necessarily be stopped.

From where I'm standing, it seems to me that the future is pretty bleak for most of the developed world.

We've reached a saturation point whereby the good old days of 8% growth are over. At 3% growth, I think life will become harder for most people.

Deepan said he didn't agree and for all our sakes, I sure hope that he's right. I guess my point is not that we should be pessimistic about the future, but that it's important to be mentally prepared for hard times 'cos "unmanaged and unrealistic " expectations on serve to create unnecessary disappointments.

(ii) Before people can try to make a difference and perhaps save the world while they are at it, it is important to work towards self mastery. Because we can even have a chance at changing the world and external environment, I believe that it is important to look inward and make sure that things are in order.

The process will never be complete and starts with self awareness. That's one of the reasons why we have peer appraisal in CS3216. Obviously, I also took the opportunity to belabour the importance of 10,000 hours and deliberate practice.

(iii) Finally, I hope that students will focus on creating value. Why? I think that vocations that create value will tend not to contribute as much to the current downward spiral that is the reality of the world of the world we live in, compared to vocations that do not.

As we had discussed, value is obviously subjective. Something of value to someone might be completely worthless to another. I have a certain disdain for wealth arising not from the fruits of one's labours that generates value for another.

In this light, I think stockpicking creates absolutely no way whatsoever and the same goes for making money off property. I see no reason why a pile of stones and bricks sitting quietly should generate significant amounts of wealth over time.

The problem with wealth arising from sources other than hard work is that it encourages greed. On the other hand, I believe that those who are able to invent new machines and groundbreaking services that solve *real* problems are entitled to become rich.

I believe that real value creation should be rewarded in monetary terms, commensurate with the value created.

In addition to these three points, I think I said a whole bunch of other random things today, but I suspect that these three things are what I tried my best to articulate today, but perhaps not very well. Today was not the best of days for me.

The funny story for today is that ex-student Linxi turn up today, and I was completely embarressed that I couldn't quite recognize her. Well, in my defense, I haven't seen her for a very long time and she has started working. She really looks quite different in make up compared to back when she was a student. We just had a rather long chat and caught up over GChat.

Even though the class is effectively over (except for tomorrow's poster presentation, which I'm quite sure will turn out *just fine*), I hope that my students will not be strangers once the class is over. They are always welcome to come have coffee with me. :-P

Personally, I don't think I did do as good a job as I could have done today, but in the same spirit of forgiveness that I had espoused, I will get over it and start working harder on my last lecture for CS1101S this Friday. We need to give ourselves some room for mistakes. :-)

After teaching for many years, the fact remains: there are better days and there are not-so-great days. Preparation helps to increase the probability of good days, but we cannot be completely sure that we will always give a good lecture.

What I do however is that I always try my best and I try to learn from the mistakes so that I can do better the next time.

While we can do everything within our powers to try to succeed, success is not always an outcome that we can control. The one thing we can control is how hard we try.

It is my hope that my students will always do their very best, in whatever they choose to do. :-)

I look forward to an interesting poster session tomorrow. :-P

The Last Lap

It is hard to believe, but we are almost done with the class. Ten weeks have passed and we have moved into the last phase of the class with the Final Project.

The poster session will be happening in two weeks.

Many weeks ago, I blogged about the importance of finishing strong.

It is over the next two weeks that we will see the true mettle of the students. We're reached a crunch time where most classes all have their assignments due at the same time. The time management skills of most of the students will be severely tested. Those who survive, will emerge stronger.

We have been pushing the various project groups to deliver a prototype and push out their projects for real users to test. The various projects are in various stages of polish and hopefully, the majority of them would be pushed out by user testing by this weekend.

User testing is a very important component of CS3216. CS3216 is not just about software engineering, though there is a lot of that. The real goal of CS3216 is to provide students with an opportunity to identify and solve a meaningful problem.

Often times, students are somewhat immature and are not very good at articulating and/or identifying a good problem. They often get confused by the difference between a problem and an idea. Ideas that don't solve an important are really not very useful.

One of the reasons why I brought in a whole bunch of local entrepreneurs to give a talk last Monday is because entrepreneurs are folks who are good at identifying problems and also executing solutions. The sharing session was quite long and I was pleased to see that quite a number of the students stayed behind even after the session was over to chat with my entrepreneur friends.

Back to user testing, it was quite clear in our Final Project discussions that many of the students, while competent software engineers, do not have sufficient product development experience and have not spend sufficient time/effort thinking through the issue of user experience. The process of user testing is supposed to help students understand how users think and how to design better products.

We've also just finished our midterm survey and it seems that many of the students have learnt quite a number of things thus far and things are going relatively well like past semesters.

The Final Projects that we have this semester are very diverse. While we only have two weeks left, CS3216 students are very competent and are capable of doing a lot in just two weeks. I am hoping that once the projects get pushed out to real users, the live feedback would serve to inspire the students to iterate harder to improve their apps.

Why Occupy Vancouver?

I am currently in Vancouver attending a conference. The weather is nice and the city is very beautiful. It is very nicely landscaped and there's a lot of greenery all over the city. It reminds me a lot of Boston.

It is interesting that my hotel is situated right next to the Occupy Vancouver protests.

As I was mulling over what I should be blogging about this week, I thought that maybe I should take a break from typical exhortations about how to scale websites and why security is important and talk about something higher-level.

I was once asked by an ex-CS3216 "what is the meaning of life?" Perhaps it might be helpful to reflect on this question with the current Occupy protests that are happening not only in Vancouver, but all over the world (except perhaps Singapore, where it failed miserably), and reflect on what is really going on.

First, there's the TV coverage on the protesters. It is not very hard to understand why people are unhappy and taking to the streets.

One protester said that all she wanted was a job and a future. She does not know how she is going to make enough money to pay for her study loans and bring up her two children. The unemployment rate in Vancouver is about 7% at the moment.

Wandering around the city, it is not obvious that things are quite so bad because there are lots of "Hiring" signs all over the place. I met this owner of a boutique and he was complaining about how the taxes and laws are making it very hard for the businesses.

Hiring is very difficult and there are local laws that prohibit the hiring of foreigners if employers are not able to "prove" that the job cannot be done by a local. The owner however complains that the locals are lazy and not willing to work hard. He said that the young go to college and do fluffy degrees like psychology and expect a high paying job.

Doesn't this all sound familiar? Classic tussle between labour and capitalists. Who is right?

Does it matter?

The sad truth is that the world today is that it's structurally broken. How exactly do the protesters think that protesting will change their lot? Many claim that their Governments are not listening. The implication, obviously, that if someone listened, someone will be able to change their lot?

Is that true? Sometimes, it is important for us to re-examine our assumptions.

I have thought very hard about the shit hole that the world is currently in. The future is really very bleak. I do not believe for a moment that the Europeans can figure out how to get out of their current mess. America is very screwed and I really don't think that their lots will improve in the short to medium term.

Singapore is actually holding out remarkably well in the midst of this insanity, but it is a question how long we can continue to hold out before also getting sucked into the mess.

I see the current situation as a deadly combination of three factors, that, together, cause what I call a spiral of death: (i) expectations; (ii) politics; and (iii) rising costs of living.

There are many things to learn in life, some of which are found in unexpected places. One of principles I learnt while doing HR for the Singapore Legal Service many years ago is called the "Principle of Equal Misery". The general idea is very simple: people are not unhappy necessarily because of how much they have, but how much they don't have, relative to others.

Critics of the Singapore Government have often cited the increasing the Gini coefficient as evidence that Singapore is doing it wrong and people are "suffering" because of the rising income inequality. The Singapore Government has always pushed back by citing growth figures and how our numbers show that our people are very much better off than folks from most places in the world. Who is right?

Obviously, I support the Government's position and I don't think that the Gini coefficient matters. I think that what matters is whether lives are improved in absolute terms. However, it hardly matters what I believe, because I represent what is known as the "rational" camp, which I suspect is in the minority.

Lots of people are unhappy because sometimes (most times?) life is not just about reason and I can illustrate this with an example.

Every now and then I go jogging to try to keep fit and as a valiant attempt to pass my annual IPPT test, and as I jog, I would inadvertently pass these big houses. When this happens, one question often pops up, "Why are these people staying in such big houses while I stay in a HDB flat? Are all these people smarter and more capable than me?"

Perhaps I might be arrogant, but I suspect that the answer is no. It is not unlikely that I am smarter, faster, more articulate and more hardworking that quite a few of the folks who own these big houses.

If so, then should I be staying in one of these houses instead of my dinky little HDB flat? :-) However, the reality is that if I stayed in my current job as a prof, I would never be able to afford such a house (at least not on a prof's salary without striking lottery or something :-)).

The obvious answer is then, obviously, to quit my job and to find a higher-paying job or start a company or something.... but this is where I stop myself, "Wait, why do I want to stay in such a house anyway?" Sure, it might be cool to stay in a big house, but am I really unhappy with where I'm staying now? As it turns out, no. So *why* am I thinking about buying a bigger house to begin with?

Life's complicated and what I have done with this example is to illustrate the issue of envy. Sometimes we might get lulled into thinking we need something we don't actually need just because someone else has it. Most people also have an inflated sense of their self-worth and think that they are better than others. When others have something that we don't and we don't think that they are better than us, we think we deserve it too. :-) That's the problem with the Gini coefficient.

The trouble with politics in the modern world is that we don't have enough benevolent and wise dictators and democracy is a failed system. The problem with democracy is that politicians need to be popular to get elected and to do so, they need to do what people want -- and the trouble is people often don't want what is good for them. Look at Steve Jobs, did he every trust the people to know what's good for them?

But this is the reality we live in and unfortunately I don't have any bright ideas for a system of Government that works better than a democracy, so we learn to live with what we get.

The biggest problem that we have in Singapore is the problem of success. It is my view that lots of people are unhappy because they are always comparing themselves to folks more successful than themselves and they have unreasonable expectations.

They expect to do better than their parents. They expect good jobs with high pay. They expect to own their own homes simply because their parents could afford to do so and they expect their kids to go to college.

To be fair, it is not entirely unreasonable to want progress and for their kids to do well. Why is that unreasonable?

This is where the original "unreasonable" needs some qualification. By unreasonable, I don't mean that it is unreasonable for people to have these expectations, just that it is unreasonable for the system to be able to fulfill these expectations.

For example, Singaporeans want their kids to go to college. They believe that the college degree is a ticket to a better life. It is partially true. The degree is a pre-requisite for many jobs. But what people fail to realise is that why college degrees and higher paying jobs are correlated, it does not necessarily mean that there is causality.

The trouble with the generally working class Singapore is that most people still don't understand that employers don't pay for degrees. They pay to get the job done. The degree is only useful as a signal for them to hire fresh graduates. Students with good grades are either (i) smart; or (ii) hardworking; or BOTH, and these are helpful traits in workers.

But how many people do we think can win elections by telling people straight in the eye, "you really shouldn't waste time getting a degree, you're not as good as 50% of the other people". There are always exceptions and late bloomers who get a degree late in life and do very well.

As more and more people get degrees become PMETs and expect higher paying jobs, we have to ask ourselves what the structure of our economy is going to look like. If we don't want to let more foreigners in, then who are going to serve in the restaurants and man the stores in the shopping malls?

The recent policy to increase university intake by another 1,000 is a disaster waiting to happen. I am not convinced that it will make our people happier in the long run. The trouble is that telling people to quit whining about not getting into university and to be content with their lot in life is not effective way to win elections. That's where politics fails.

I really do think that a very very important aspect of successful governance for the next 2 decades is to get people to wake up their idea and to be grateful that they have a roof over their heads and that they are not starving. People should really go to India and see how some of the folks there are living. WHY do Singaporeans deserve better and to be able to retire and not wash dishes at the hawker centers when they grow old? Many Singaporeans, probably because of their hard work and/or good fortunate will live relatively comfortably till the reach their graves, but does that mean that EVERYONE deserves the same?

This brings us to the last problem and that's the cost of living and this problem is *REAL*. There's some truth in that Singapore has already done pretty well compared to many other major cities in the world, but I really don't think we did well enough.

The biggest problem is property. Property is not a "normal" good, or the sort that is easily described by the supply-demand curves in Economics 101. The demand is obviously somewhat inelastic because everyone needs a room over his/her head. Prices are however completely out of whack.

Does it make any sense? From the fact that there are very few people on the streets, we know that there is enough accommodation to give everyone a shelter. The problem is that the high property prices feeds into the high rental costs and also high mortgage payments that feeds the increasing costs of living. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that many of the young are impatient and do have understand financial planning and credit.

Personally, I don't think much of property. People just need a place to stay. A property sitting idle and not doing much shouldn't be allowed to generate extra-normal returns. When people are allowed to make a lot of money without creating value, we are creating a moral hazard for society. So it is with Wall Street.

Obviously, I think that the right thing is for the Government to exercise its policy tools to drastically bring down the property prices. Many people will probably agree, except that they probably don't understand that such a move would be v bloody all round and be political suicide. This further underlines the problem with politics. Sometimes what is beneficial for the greater good simply cannot be done because people need to get elected. >.<

So what's the moral of this *really long* story? :-) That is something I hope that the students will think about. Perhaps post some comments and we can discuss.

On Excellence and Death

Steve Jobs once said:

We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent.
Because this is our life.
Life is brief, and then you die, you know?
And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives.
So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.
Be a yardstick of quality.
Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

This comment was apparently made in 2008, when the man was almost certainly fully cognizant of his impending demise.

It is not my purpose to bury or to praise the man. I would just like to take this opportunity to discuss the topic of excellence.

Some folks think that excellence means starting a billion-dollar company or perhaps winning the Nobel Prize or something like that. I don't think so.

I actually agree with Steve. The brutal truth is that life is often nasty, brutish and short. Unlike a computer game, one doesn't have the luxury of reloading life from a saved game. We only get one shot at it.

In this light, it is my opinion that excellence is not so much a destination, but an attitude. We all have to decide what we want to do with our lives and give it our best.

When Steve says that "everyone should be excellent", he cannot mean that everyone can be excellent at anything.

Different people are different and it is in that diversity that mankind has successfully reached our current stage of modern civilization.

The trouble is that many are stuck trying to conform to what are society's norms and standards. Parents want their kids to become lawyers and doctors because they think that guarantees a good life. Many students want to join banks after graduation because they want to make a lot of money. Another girl I know is desperate to get married because her friends are getting engaged and are queueing for a flat.

My hope for my students is that they will find the courage in themselves to do something that they find meaningful and work towards becoming excellent at something. Anything.

Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “If life makes you a street sweeper, be the best street sweeper you can be” and there is a story about a janitor that makes this point in a very poignant way.

Finally, I really don't think a life needs to be long. No one gets to decide how long his/her life will be (unless he/she decides to end it prematurely) so it's not really worth fretting over. How many people live longer lives fretting over it?

We should just learn to be grateful for each day we get and do things according to our good conscience (and be mindful of our mortality).

I am grateful for what I have. I have a lovely wife and two beautiful daughters and get to decide what to do each day that will make a small difference. I count my blessings every day. :-)

On Sales

While CS3216 is not a marketing class, one of the key points that I would like students to take away from the course is the importance of sales.

While the hope that is that good engineers will be able to build insanely great products that will eventually "sell themselves", the road to success is hard and often times all we have are not a real product, but a dream.

To get to the actual product, we might first have to sell that dream.

First, come the idea and then comes the execution. Sales is part of that execution.

I would like to put on record my gratitude to Yanjie for taking time off to teach a Presentation workshop last Saturday. Sadly, attendance wasn't that good.

I would like to take this opportunity to highlight two classic TED talks that I think all the students should watch and understand:



In addition, Yanjie highlighted the following clips during the workshop:






I hope that the students who missed the workshop will check out these video clips.

This Friday evening, we will be holding our customary Final Project pitching party. The party serves as an opportunity for the class to come together to celebrate the completion of half the course and also to come together to share their ideas on what they think would make for a good Final Project.

This pitching session is also about community. Many ex-students of the course will also come back and hang out. To listen to what the new batch of students have to say, to share their two cents or perhaps just for some free food and fellowship on a Friday evening.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my trusty TA Kok Wee and the tutors Eldwin, Zhao Cong and Haocong for the work that they have put in thus far to keep the course running like clockwork. Another 7 more weeks and we'd be done with yet another offering of CS3216.

Time really flies. Hard to believe that this is already the fourth year.

On Ideas

I would like to congratulate my students on surviving the first 25% of the course with the completion of the Facebook application assignment and also the FB/iPad Application Seminar.

CS3216 follows a tried and tested formula: the first six weeks is about honing technical skills and developing ideas.

Clearly the two programming assignments, Facebook and Mobile-Cloud applications, are designed to help students pick up technical skills (both programming and design) in a hurry and I think we have done well with the FB/iPad app assignment.

At the same time, the students are also expected to apply their technical skills to explore some new ideas and hopefully, the feedback that they will be getting will be helpful to them.

I personally think that most ideas are not *completely* original. Most ideas are inspired by other ideas. Hence, it is also important for students to look around to see what's already available. Obviously, the FB/iPad app seminar was designed to do this.

Tonight, we will have having another activity that is designed to achieve the same goals. We have invited external folks to come pitch possible Final Projects to the students. In this way, the students will get a sense of what the "market" cares about.

Ideas also need "timeliness". Sometimes having an idea is not good enough. Obviously, coming up with an idea too late is bad ('cos someone would have done it), but some ideas fail because they are "too early".

Also, it is my view that engineers should build stuff and for CS3216, instead of merely building assignments that will be graded and then thrown away, I hope that the students will take the opportunity to build something real that people actually care about.

In this light, the students are welcome to work with external partners on real problems (if they want).

Obviously, there are limits on what could realistically be accomplished in a 7-week Final Project. Still, because CS3216 students are technically capable, it is not unlikely that they would be able to put together a reasonably good proof-of-concept prototype.

Hopefully, the Final Projects wouldn't just end when the course ends. Realistically, most times, they will. But I am confident that it is certainly plausible that we might see a working product that started in CS3216 someday if we try this enough times.

To conclude, I would like to say that I think it's good to share ideas. I think most people overrate their ideas. The probability that someone will come up with a completely original idea that no one else in the world has ever come up with is very low.

And in practice, coming up with an idea is the easy part. It's the execution that is really difficult and where most fail. That said, there are also some circumstances under which some stealth is a good idea. It just turns out that it's unlikely that in CS3216, these circumstances will arise.

I hope that for the duration of the course (which only has 9 weeks left really) that the students will share and generate ideas liberally.

On Peer Teaching/Learning

Since we are having the FB/iPad application seminar this evening, it seems fitting that I take some time to explain what we are trying to do with this exercise.

This is the 4th year that we're teaching CS3216 and also the 4th time that we're doing this seminar.

Obviously, I didn't quite get it right the first year and the seminar in its current manifestation is the result of several iterations.

It turns out that the seminar is not random assignment, but it is a specially designed component for CS3216 to promote peer learning.

First, since students are learning how to develop apps in CS3216, it is natural to study existing apps in order to learn the good, the bad and the ugly.

While it is easy for me to come up with a set of lecture slides articulating what is good, bad and ugly (and I did exactly that in my first year teaching CS3216), it quickly occurred to me that such an approach made little to no sense. That list is pretty common sense. Students would listen to me lecture, agree with me and I suspect would hardly remember a thing or be able to apply what they heard.

The FB seminar is the chance for students to come together to do a case study of an existing application to figure out what is good or bad about it. We hope that the very act of coming together to discuss would promote what's called "peer learning."

Thereafter, the act of presenting what each group had figure out further promotes peer learning and also helps students practise their presentation skills. It turns out that CS3216 typically have good presentation skills which is something that is helpful to learn through demonstration.

One of the mistakes I made for the first 2 years was not to control the duration of the presentations, and students then tended to ramble on and on. The seminar ran over time and learning was not optimal.

Since last year, we introduced Pecha Kucha, and the groups were "forced" to keep their talk to just 7 minutes. It turns out that this time limit has two advantages: (i) helped to ensure that class ended on time; and (ii) students are forced to think harder about what's important. :-)

Rambling is easy. Getting to the crux of what's important is hard and promotes learning.

Finally, the students are forced to focus on all the presentations because they are required to write a critique about one of the presentations (but not their own). This final act of "forced" reflection would hopefully encourage reflection and deeper learning. Students are also required to engage each other in the blogs for a week to promote further discussion.

We have no illusions that not every student would necessary learn what they are supposed to be learning in this process, but we try. While we ideally teaching to be highly uniform, information transfer is not the same as education. The efficient transfer of information is completely useless if students cannot actually apply what they learnt.

It is much more effective if students learn less but are able to apply, and more importantly, LEARN HOW TO LEARN in the process. The following lecture by a famous Harvard prof Eric Mazur probably explains what I'm trying to say in a more articulate way (for those who have the time and patience to watch the full lecture).

On Wealth

I'm so swamped this week, it's not funny.

It turns out that I did have something to write about but didn't quite get the chance to write about it. Until now.

It is something that I said to one student -- can't recall who now -- and it's about wealth. My point: the only real wealth that we have is our time, not money.

Case in point: Steve Jobs. He is one of the richest men in the world, but all the wealth in the world will do him no good if he doesn't have the time to spend it.

And to some extent, nature is fail. Regardless of king or pauper, we get 24 hours everyday. No more, no less.

While I'm *really* *really* short of time (at least at this moment in time), I'm really not too unhappy because I am spending my time doing things I chose to do.

This simple fact is something I am actually quite grateful for. :-)

Another interesting fact is that often times, money often used to buy time. For example, we might hire a maid to help us with household or spend money on medical treatments to expand our lifespans.

Not trying to be too philosophical here, but His Holiness The Dalai Lama, was quoted to have said the following when asked what surprised him most about humanity, “he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."

Back to Jobs, it seems to me that most of you will go on to live longer lives than Jobs. But what does that mean? Do you necessarily lead better lives?

If we model life as a candle, I would prefer to burn brightly for a shorter period than to be a dim glow for all eternity, but that's just me. :-)

It is now the third week of the semester and most students should have their lives overtaken by the first assignment, and very soon the second assignment and Final Projects.

What I hope that you will keen in mind is exactly why you are investing your time in CS3216. CS3216 is not to be taken for a grade. It is to be taken to learn something that will help each of you succeed in your chosen profession, or perhaps just provide you with the opportunity to understand yourselves.

10 weeks will pass in a jiffy. It always does.

I would like to encourage you to read each others blogs and to engage each other in conversation. Much of the learning in CS3216 is also peer learning.

To conclude, I quote my wife, "You can vote for the wrong President, you cannot marry the wrong woman." :-P

Finishing Strong

Blogging is stressful. I do it because I always believed in walking the talk.

It didn't take me too long to realize that students (children) don't do what we say, but do what we do.

For teachers to have the moral authority to preach, they unfortunately will have to practise what they preach.

It turns out that I can sorta write, so writing is not entirely stressful. The reason why blogging for this class is stressful is because there is this pressure to "say something smart".

The problem is that this is the fourth time that I'm teaching this course and the third time I'm writing a blog because of this class. I don't actually read through what I wrote in the past (really don't have that sort of time or energy), but it also means that I risk repeating what I said in the past.

Fortunately for me, something struck me while I was reading the class blogs and it's something that I think is extremely important: finishing strong.

NUS does have its fair share of good and talented students. Yet, one quality that I have found that is often lacking is the tenacity to see something to the end.

It is quite common to find students get excited about something and work very hard at it (especially in CS3216).

The problem with life is that most things that are worth doing, are, well, HARD. While things can look really good at the beginning, things get more dreary and more painful as time goes on. There are also often problems. Sometimes, many, many problems.

And often times, people end up going through motion towards the end, or perhaps they just give up.

Three things I would like to say on this topic of "Finishing Strong":

1. Life is more often a marathon rather than a sprint and so there's a need to conserve energy for the long haul and also manage morale. People often give up because they under-estimate how long it takes.
2. Only the paranoid survive. It is easy to get lulled into complacency. The job is never finished until we are past the finishing line. We should not celebrate prematurely and let our guard down. I'm teaching CS1101s for the sixth time (and teaching CS3216 for only the fourth time). I almost have Scheme coming out of my ears and I can probably teach CS1101S backways. Nevertheless, if you ask my tutors, both classes are treated as "fresh enemies" and not a single stone is left upturned to make sure that nothing goes wrong (as best as we can help it).
3. We don't always do things because it "feels good". To finish strong, sometimes we need to appeal to our conviction that we need to do some things just because "it is right" not because we "feel like it". If you asked me, I'd really rather be on a beach sipping pina colada than writing a blog, but we do what we need to do.

Confession

It is hard to imagine that again it's the day before CS3216 starts. This is the fourth time.

Every semester I get to teach CS3216, I get ulcers. This semester is likely to be worse than normal since I also get to teach CS1101S concurrently.

How cool is that? :-)

Do I not always say "what doesn't kill you, makes you strong?"

Always good to eat your own dog food. :-)

For the information of the new batch of CS3216 students, I blog because I think it's important to lead by example. Also, over the years, I have found blogging to be a very effective way for students to reflect upon what they really learn in the class, and also for me to understand how they think and to engage them.

In ordinary times, I would probably be responding to every single blog and most posts that students make. But these are not ordinary times. Even if I don't sleep I probably couldn't manage. >.<

What can assure every single student however is that I will be reading every blog post they make religiously and I mean it. :-)

Then I have a final confession to make.

I really don't know HTML5 and CSS3 even as we speak. :-)

This is probably very shocking because people will be wondering HOW it is possible that students are expected to learn about HTML5 and CSS3 if the prof has no clue.

It turns out that if we go back in time 3 years ago when I first started this course, I had no clue how to build Facebook apps either.

We are working with pretty bleeding edge stuff in CS3216 (and thanks to Facebook's capriciousness in how they change their APIs without telling anyone, there will be quite a lot of bleeding over the semester).

If we wait till the prof figures it all out before we conduct this course, this course would never exist.

Obviously, I have also figured out a way to conduct CS3216 without knowing a whole lot. The truth of the matter is that it is possible for me to conduct such a course because the course is not about *stuff* to being with, but about learning how to learn. :-)

I think that honesty is a virtue and it's important for us all to know what we know and more importantly, what we DON'T know.

Sadly, profs really don't know everything and don't have all the answers.

In fact, not all questions have answers. Though the process of formal education has this nasty tendency to persuade students otherwise. :-'(

As they say, in teaching, you tell them what you want to tell them, you tell them and then you tell them that you told them.

Parents send their children to university, hoping that they will get an education. What exactly is that?

IMHO, there are only two things that matter in education (might add more to the list if I figure out more things later): MINDSET and VALUES. The world is changing too fast for *stuff* to matter too much and learning *stuff* is really the easy part.

My goal as a prof is to help students succeed (whatever that means). Success doesn't always mean getting rich, though often it might. I am absolutely convinced that having the right "growth" mindset and the right work ethics is pre-requisite and enabler for success.

Much of CS3216 is structured around creating the environment within which students can build up that mindset. Much of it involves some amount of shared suffering. Suffering, as it turns out, builds character. >:-)

The other key element is values. By this I mean honesty and integrity. Those who are driven and highly motivated often do succeed, but without the right moral compass, we might just have another Enron on our hands, which is obviously NOT a good thing.

To conclude, I would like to share a short speech, given by Caleb Chao, who was SoC Valedictorian last year, and also one of those students crazy enough to have taken CS3216 in his freshman year when the course was first offered 3 years ago.

Random Stuff to Check Out

I have a habit of posting random stuff in the IVLE Discussion Forum for CS3216 in past classes. One student suggested that instead of posting them in IVLE to post them on this blog. I will still continue to post random stuff in the IVLE Discussion Forum this year, but what I will also do is to continue adding stuff to this list as we go along. Thanks to the Internet, there is so much knowledge and wisdom out there that's accessible with a click of a button. It would be criminal not to learn from them. :-)

Anyhow, here some of the interesting stuff to read/check out:

1. Steve Job's Stanford Commencement Speech 2005 (Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish)


2. The Art of Teaching Entrepreneurship and Innovation


3. Adrian Tan's NTU Convocation Speech


4. Randy's Lecture on Time Management


5. David Rose on Pitching


6. How Bill Gates hopes to make a difference


7. Nick Vujicic


8. Barry Schwartz on Common Sense/Wisdom


9. Pattie Maes on Sixth Sense, a next-generation Minority-Report-like user interface.


10. Richard St. John's 8 secrets of success


11. Anthony Robbins: The Power of Clarity & Purpose


12. Kiran Bir Sethi teaches kids to take charge


13. Cameron Herold: Let's raise kids to be entrepreneurs


14. The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination, JK Rowling


15. Secrets of a $110 million dollar man


16. Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn


17. Is Your Life Just One Big RPG? Part I, Part II, Part III


18. Anthony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better


19. Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!


20. Paul Graham: The Power of the Marginal

Note: this is an old blog entry that I moved forward in time.

Teaching as a Learning Process

As students are "forced" to reflect on what they have learnt this past semester as their swan song, I thought that it would be helpful for me to do the same -- but more than that, I decided that I would reflect not only on the current semester, but on the three-year journey that is CS3216.

At the heart of CS3216 is my belief that Singapore is much too mediocre a society and what we really lack are peaks. By mediocrity, I don't actually mean bad. Mediocre actually means "average" and in the context of Singapore, it's a pretty high average.

However, what I had come to realize by observing what's been happening in recent times is that a high average isn't going to cut it. Not by a long shot. :-(

The world at large is getting increasingly complex. We are slowly but steadily running out of oil. China is fast becoming bigger and more unstable. US is fast moving towards implosion and bankruptcy. The picture really isn't pretty.

In this light, what I felt what that what Singapore really needs are peaks.

I also had a very dim view of the old farts like myself. I've missed my chance to be a Page or Zuckerberg. The future really belongs to the youth of today and the leaders of tomorrow. Education is the answer.

Then the question was: how in the world do we go about creating those peaks?

Then I watched The Last Lecture and decided that maybe Randy Pausch knew what he was talking about and saw that Facebook was like the best thing since sliced bread and created CS3216 - because I thought, maybe if we did something different, some good might come out of it.

Now that I have the whole system up and running, I can obviously tell a story about how brilliant I was when I "conceived" of CS3216. However, the truth of the matter is much less glamorous. I hardly knew what I was doing and I was mostly making things up as I went along. :-)

What I DID know however was that what I really wanted to do was to help facilitate the formation (not creation) of those peaks that we need so badly. The idea is that the peaks were already there, but we just haven't quite been able to bring them out or the systems and structures we have in place were perhaps and impediment.

I really didn't know but as Randy says, "Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you."

Because I didn't really know what I was doing, I ended up talking to a lot of people, mostly successful people --- and it wasn't too long before it became conclusive that there is no "formula" for success. The unfortunate corollary of this finding is that we can't really create peaks the way we used to train engineers.

What I did find however was that successful people tend to think differently from the regular folks. It's really not about IQ. It's all about mindset.

I think Anthony Robbins articulates this in a way that I cannot possibly:

"Guess how many emotions people typically experience? Less than 12 and half of them make them feel like sh*t".

Along the way, I have indeed found that notwithstanding differences in natural talent (or what's typically referred to as "Nature"), that people are products of their own experiences (or "Nurture"). Nurture is not just about how many tuition teachers one has had in the past. It's *much* deeper and more profound.

Much of this I sort of figured out along the way as a scientist observing the world and the people that run around in it. In recent times, I've come to learn about this thing known as "Neural Linguistic Programming" and I'm in the midst of figuring out how it all works. :-) It's nice to have someone else work out the theory for you instead of having to start from first principles.

The theory here is that most people typically have a lot of potential to do a lot more, except that they are "programmed wrongly". Well, it turns out that I'm a Computer Scientist. If it's just a buggy program, then I'm right at home. Debugging is probably no sweat lah. Just have to figure out how the heck to load the darn thing into memory without frying someone's brains. :-)

Teaching CS3216 has been really rewarding for me because I've also actually gotten a lot smarter about a whole bunch of random things along the way. It's sometimes not even clear to me (like it's not clear to the students) that I've actually been teaching, but I've definitely learnt a lot.

It's funny, but I came up with this conjecture earlier this evening that maybe CS3216 is just a class I created for myself to learn stuff I wanted to learn..... and along the way, I just sort of collected some students to learn with me? :-P

I really like to learn stuff. I hope that to a small extent, some of the students this past semester have also started to appreciate the value of keeping their eyes open and learning random stuff. :-)

The motto for CS3216 is "make a difference". Now that the course is coming to an end and we're moving on to bigger and badder things next year, it might be timely for me to share my views on this matter.

I think it's HARD to actually make a difference. Like I said during the Last Lecture, most people are a lot less important than they think they are and our existence in this world is really quite transient. What is a 100 years in the face of eternity? Anyone knows his/her great-grandfather?

Does it therefore mean that we should therefore give up and life an "ordinary life"? Well, that's a choice that each and every person must make for himself/herself.

What I do think however is that to stand a chance at making a difference, we first have to BELIEVE that WE CAN MAKE a DIFFERENCE.

At the very least, we can try (though I also say "Do or Do Not, There is no Try".... maybe I'm a bit schizophrenic :-P).

Trying doesn't guarantee success. Sometimes the Gods will seem to conspire against us. What can mere mortals do? :-)

That said, what I do know is that if we don't try, we fail by default.

To conclude, I shall leave the students with one (hard) question that they should attempt as homework: WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?
Not to worry. It's not graded - at least not by me. ;-)

This question doesn't have a model answer I think. Because everyone is built differently, it's likely that the answer will be different for each student. But this is actually an important question because the answer will reveal the sort of person we are and also be a guiding force to our short existence.

To make the point more poignant (sorry this is a bit morbid), imagine yourself lying in your deathbed with hours left to go and someone asks you: "what the heck have you been doing with your life?" What will your answer be?

On Wealth and Execution

I haven't blogged for a while and I realized that many students haven't blogged as well - but we'd talk about that later.

I also wanted to do an experiment to test if students would blog if I didn't blog. Sad to say, not many did. :-(

What came to me earlier today is something quite philosophical, and thats the question: what is wealth?

I recently get in touch with Nipun Mehta who has an interesting perspective on this question:

His solution is the "gift economy", which attempts to "redefine wealth as contributions, not possessions".

While interesting, and perhaps noble, such a definition is a little too abstract for me.

So I approached this question from a more basic angle: if I can have an infinite amount of anything I want, what would it be? Money?

Sometimes when you ask questions the "right way", you the get the "right" answers.

My answer was pretty obvious: TIME.

If only I had more time. I have so many thing I have to do. I have so many things I wanna do. I never seem to have enough time to do them all. :-( Simple as that. Instead of a daily struggle to pay the bills, mine is a struggle to stay afloat.

Let's try to get everything squared away without blowing anything up yeah?

If you will think a little deeper. There are two things that the world cares about: energy and money. To some extent, the two are actually interchangeable. Energy is money, albeit in a different form.

Why do we need money or energy? Basically to buy time.

Because we have money, we can take a plane or drive a car instead of walking on foot. That saves us hellaluvalot of time.

Because we have money, we can go to the restaurants, we don't need to hunt down the animal, skin it and cook it ourselves.

Because we have money, we can hire a maid to take care of the housework so that we don't have to do the laundry.

Because we have money, we might be able to pump ourselves with more advanced medical treatments so that we don't die so early and have more time.

You get the point. But suppose we all agree that wealth is really time, then there are two obvious corollaries:

One, life is very fair, because regardless of king or pauper, we all have the same amount of time everyday: only 24 hours. No more. No less.

Two, what should we do with our time?

I am not about to suggest that there is a model answer to the second question. To each his own. I am merely sharing a perspective.

The second point I want to touch on in this blog entry is execution, which coincidentally is the theme for the second part of CS3216, if people still remember.

It turns out that CS3216 is not the easiest class to teach. Because of the way it is structured, there are a lot of random variables.

I don't know beforehand who I can get as speakers. I don't know who will turn me down. I don't know who will agree to come talk to the class, but have to cancel and/or reschedule.

I don't know whether the new Google Wave assignment will work out. I didn't even know what Google Wave was about when we started. Thank God it worked out. :-P

Because I am teaching this class for the third time, I am obviously much smarter than when I started, but there are (always) surprises.

For example, while I had expected all the teams to do well for the milestone portion of the Facebook assignment, some teams blew up on and I had to make up some new rules to remedy the situation and to put the course back on track.

Now that we're nearing the end of the semester, I must say that I'm quite pleased to see how things have turned out and as far and I'm concerned, we're pretty much cruising to the end.

There's still the poster session next Wed, but it's quite manageable.

The only other loose end that I need to tie up is the Blogging King/Queen business. As it turns out, this current batch of students dun really like to blog and dun blog consistently. This is very different from the last batch -- but why am I surprised? :-)

Upon careful deliberation, I hereby declare MYSELF the Blog King for this batch 'cos I think I have blogged much more consistently and conscientiously than any of the students.

Because there can only be one, and I'm the one, this means that the no one gets a free A by blogging for this batch. At least not the way it was envisioned at the start of the semester. Sorry.

Am I upset that blogging didn't quite work out this semester? Actually, no 'cos the point of the class is not about blogging. Everything that's done for CS3216 is supposed to go towards promoting learning. While the blogging component this year hasn't been quite so successful, some good has come out of it and that's about as good as it gets.

In case people are wondering if this means it's the end of blogging for the rest of the semester. The answer is no. However. more will be revealed at the Last Lecture on Monday. Akan datang.

People should not forget that I'm the evil prof. >:-P

To conclude, the point I'm trying to make about execution is that it involves focussing on the big picture and high-level goal, without losing sight of the details and begin able to adapt to unexpected events and being able to improvise as you go along. Yeah, it's a mouthful. Go chew on it. :-)

On Mindsets

I'm a prof. Mine is a funny business.

In theory, profs are supposed to teach. What does that really mean? Some people think that teaching is about imparting knowledge. Others talk about teaching critical thinking.

Personally, I look at my job a little differently. I think it's about helping people (students).

I think teaching is about helping students lead better lives, helping them figure out what the heck they ought to be doing with their lives (though I often fail in this department because it sometimes takes longer than the window during which I'm teaching the students) and last but not least, to help them achieve their full potential.

This is all very general and unfortunately has little to do with CS.

Notice that I didn't say "helping students succeed" above. The reason is that it's hard to define "success". Some would equate success with wealth; others might have other view. Few would argue with "leading better lives". :-)

So now here's the problem: if I'm supposed to help my students succeed, then I better an idea about what it takes to succeed. Even a moron can tell you that nature and nurture both play a part, so a "nature vs nurture" discussion won't be helpful.

I guess I am fortunate to have met quite a few people in my life thus far, many of whom I would consider to be "successful" people. While I am not actively looking at wealth, most of them also turn out to be relatively wealthy, or I predict will soon be quite wealthy.

If people haven't seen this clip, Richard St. John's 8 secrets of success, they should. In any case, the point of this clip is that one obvious approach to understand what leads to success is to "study" successful people.

That's pretty much what I did.

More specifically, I tried to figure out the key difference between the sample set of "successful" people and the "other" folks (I hesitate to call them "unsuccessful").

What I found is that it's a zoo out there. Among the successful people, there are folks who are highly qualified and went to the top Ivy League schools. There are also some who don't have much of an education.

The one common thing that I have observed however is that they typically have what I would describe as a "winning mindset":

1. They believe in something. Sometimes God. Sometimes other things. Mostly things bigger than themselves.


2. They like themselves. I don't mean that they are narcissists who look in the mirror everyday thinking "I'm so smart. I'm so good looking..." Nope. These folks accept themselves for who they are, warts and all.


3. They accept personal responsibility. Singaporeans like to blame Government, blame father, blame mother, blame anyone and everyone except themselves when things go wrong. It's always the system is wrong, because there's streaming, too focussed on grades.
   
   Bill Gates apparently said "life is unfair get used to it". People need to quit complaining and actively take action to improve their own lots in life.
   


4. They have a Can-Do spirit. Truthfully, there are very few things that cannot be done in Singapore. More often than not, Singaporeans fail even before they start because in their infinite wisdom they have already decided it would fail in their heads --- and many a times, it's because the understanding is flawed.


5. They seek continual growth. Success does require a certain amount of effort and hard work even for the truly gifted. Being gifted only means you put in less than the rest to get to the same place. Doesn't mean that you can put in no effort.


6. They don't carry baggage. This is related to the first point about liking themselves. Some folks have this need to prove themselves. That's a no-no.
   
   Some people will say that actually, this need to "prove oneself" might help some people succeed.... well, there's some truth to this, but I think the Star Wars analogy is appropriate. These urges to "prove oneself" is a Dark Side power. Sure, some people might succeed from the apparent drive that stems from these urges, but it's likely to lead to other problems eventually like arrogance and stuff.
   
   Think the Force. Yoda? The little green man? We want balance. Those who have such issues please acknowledge and go deal with your baggage. Unfortunately, this is really harder than I make it sound. However, people please try.

In CS3216, I try to do achieve three goals:

1. Teach stuff. Actually, I don't really teach lah. The way we try to nail this is to design good assignments to have students teach themselves and each other. I also try to get real experts in stuff I something about but not a whole lot to give a more *authentic* perspective on what I think matters.

2. Teach thinking. This happens at the project meetings. Every project is different and basically, I try to walk through how to approach the projects as problems with the students.

3. Reinforce/Fix Mindsets. This is most ambitious, but I also think the truly important and transformative one. I mentioned this briefly earlier this evening to a group of students and someone asked, "So what's your conversion rate?"

I felt like a website for about 2 seconds and then I said,"30%?". Truthfully, I humtum one. I actually don't know for sure. Maybe I'm just generating leads?

Not everything in life that has value or meaning can be captured with a KPI/web metric. :-)

On Wave and the Final Project

I was just reminded by my trusty Tutor, Yanjie, that I have not been setting a good example for the class because I haven't blogged for a while.

Fair enough, so I blog. :-) [May this serve as a gentle reminder to the students that while they were exempt from blogging last week because they were expected to be working on their Final Project Proposals, they are expected to resume with their weekly posts this week.]

After reading some of the feedback from the midterm survey, perhaps I can take the opportunity to explain again why students are asked to blog: (i) because it "forces" reflection, which will help in learning (causes pain because learning takes effort); (ii) it helps many students improve their writing skills (yes, writing can be improved simply by writing more); and (iii) it helps me figure out what students are learning or are not learning.

Students who don't think blogging is of value to them or who have no time to blog, don't have to blog. Maybe they will take a minor penalty in the final grades for the class, but in the grand scheme of things, it probably doesn't matter. Students should just have the guts to do stuff they wanna do and find value in doing. :-)

Just one perspective to consider: suppose you decide not to blog because you don't like to write (which typically suggests that you don't write very well) then you have basically given up an opportunity to practice and improve your writing. Just think about who is paying the tuition. :-)

Anyhow, just did my first video conferencing lecture on Monday, "live" from Sydney! I thought the audio quality (barring a short period of static) was pretty good. The visuals however probably weren't too great.

I shan't go into too much detail about the talk, since the students are likely to say more. I would like to highlight three key points.

One, the Google Wave Active Robot API is really quite intriguing. Why? Because why Waves were in the past confined within the browser, the Active Robot API allows robots outside the browser to interact with Waves which are these logical conversations "somewhere in the cloud".

It seems to me that some interesting things can be done with Robots now (though I'm not entirely sure what) and I would like to encourage students to think of Waves not so much as this page in the browser but as "conversation objects". The Wave is really some abstract object and not just a browser-thing. Students should spend more time thinking through and try to understand what a Wave is.

Two, the principles of Wave-y extensions are pretty interesting and might perhaps be applicable to user interface and interaction design at large, instead of just Waves. Two key points raised: don't modify stuff by removing/reformatting the text. If you need to modify stuff, give users the choice. :-P

Three, lag is a huge problem for Wave at this point. That said, I believe that when the lag gets engineered away, there will indeed be some things that can be done better in Wave than in other media. One function that seems to be missing in Wave at the moment is search. There's a search facility to search in the Waves, but what I mean is that each Wave should have a in-page search facility to search within a Wave when the Wave gets long. Otherwise how to find stuff?

Hmm, just realized that maybe a Wave robot can do exactly that -- which in a way highlights an important feature of Wave over something like Gmail, it's pretty easy to extend. :-)

Alright, so much for Waves, some words of advice on the Final Projects since this week is the week where I meet with the various groups to do sanity checks:

Please do something you really believe in. I'm proud to say that after two years of CS3216, I've finally "figured it out" and I finally have the confidence to say that "students can do anything they want" (and still be reasonably sure that things will turn out okay). This is the chance for you to do something that you've always wanted to do but never found the time to do. This is the chance for you to do more than just another class project. This is the chance to work with perhaps the most motivated and talented students NUS has to offer on something that can make a difference. I think it would be criminal to settle for anything less.

Think Big, Take Small Incremental Bites. It's good to have a vision, but it also important to be grounded in reality. You have to learn to phase the implementation of the problem into small bit-sized chunks and nail them one at a time instead of trying to swallow the whole thing and choke. To do well for the Final Project, it's not about doing A LOT A LOT of work. Small projects, executed well can also find phenomenal success. However, it requires students to do a significantly larger amount of thinking than other class projects where the perimeters are much more clearly defined. Depending on the nature of the project, the considerations are different. Understand the problem; focus your energies on what matters most.

Deploy Early. The merits of deploying a working prototype early (within the next two weeks) cannot be overstated. In addition to being able to gather valuable user feedback early, it improves morale significantly and will allow students to avoid running into conflicts with the projects from other classes.

Have Fun! There are few things you will remember about school in a couple of years after you finish school. Believe it or not, many of you will remember the nights you spend with your friends in COM1. Remember you only live once. :-)

Making Connections

We had a number of folks from Government organizations and the industry come down to pitch ideas for the Final Project to the students today.

My friend, Dawn, was very kind and complimented me for saying some things after each presentation to try to "make the connections", to which I replied, but that's all very natural isn't it? Learning is all about making connections what.

I didn't think too of it because it was almost an instinct, but then thinking about it a little harder -- maybe it isn't really obvious (by the way, there's actually a term for the stuff I did. Those are called "earn my pay" moments). Hold that thought.

Then I recalled another conversation I had with another colleague about a week ago. This colleague argued that the current student feedback system and ratings were "unfair" because it is plausible that you might have a good prof, who does "the right things" to help students learn, but the students dun appreciate and he gets whacked.

Before people make an assumptions that this colleague of mine is getting low teaching ratings, let me just clarify that this colleague has phenomenally high ratings -- therefore, he is saying this without prejudice.

My view (and I think this view is shared by Yanjie) is that contrary to popular belief, students actually do know whether teaching is effective. If indeed a prof is doing the "right thing", then it is also his responsibility to explain to the students why he's doing the right thing.

Back to my original point - the point I want to make about learning is that it's not about accumulating information or data, it's about making connections.

It would be nice if students can make the connections by themselves. However, given that students don't have all that much experience and are not typically mind-readers, it is often helpful for the profs to help make those connections.

I shall illustrate this principle with the Final Project pitching session we had this evening.

Random people coming to talk about random stuff. At first sight, it may all seem very random -- but it's not.

Well, CS3216 is organized into two segments: "Ideas + Skills" followed by "Execution".

The pitching session we had this evening contributes to the ideas part of the equation.

Obviously, the quality of the pitches were not equally good, but students should always pay attention to learn what's good and also learn what not to do.

Some of the folks who came didn't have a clear idea of what they wanted to do -- but that's very normal. The following is an except of a GChat conversation with Kay Hong:

me: what do you think of tonight's session? interesting?
Tay: yup but i think some companies weren't specific with what they wanted
not sure if that's a good or bad thing
me: normal
everyone wants to get on the boat
but they dun understand the boat
dun understand where they want to go
but they think the boat's cool anyway .... and they are probably right in many cases
:-)

It's true that Facebook is old news -- and that Facebook is probably going public soon. But it's also true that there are many people out there who are still trying to figure out how to exploit social networks to improve their business.

Personally, I believe that there's still significant potential for many businesses to exploit social networks. The viral nature of human relationships (think gossip) cannot be understated.

Is it easy therefore? Hell no. :-)

While opportunity is all around us, it takes effort to learn how to recognize and exploit them.

We'd follow up on this theme of "ideas" in a couple of weeks at a Pitching Party where the students will pitch to each other and former students will be invited back to share well.

For skills, we had the first FB assignment and the Google Wave assignment to get students up-to-speed in a hurry on their technical skills.

The FB app seminar we had last week is a combination of both ideas and skills. On one hand, the students are expected to think about existing apps to understand why they work (or FAIL); on the other hand, they get to learn some presentation and writing skills. Both of which will be helpful to them in the *real* world.

There will also be two more case studies coming up where students will be forced to think about user interaction (not just interface) design and also about team dynamics. These are not like technical skills, but soft skills that will help them execute their Final Project better.

"Execution" = Final Project. That's all.

But execution is perhaps the most important thing that I hope students learn. Ideas are cheap. Execution is what makes people rich (or helps them save/conquer (pick one) the world).

Since I'm blogging about today's pitching session before any of the students (lead by example), it might be helpful for me to provide a suggestion on what to blog about the session since the session might seem kinda random to some students (though students are free to do their own thing and surprise me -- just no gambling and no porn thank you).

Well, I'm really interested in (student) learning. I would be quite happy to hear from each student the (i) three things that they learnt today, (ii) why they think the three things are the most important among all the things they learnt today (hopefully there are more than three) and (iii) how they will APPLY these three things to their lives/final project/job moving forward. Simple? :-P

The Answer is Yes

It's been a really busy week for everyone.

While the students were busy blogging about the Facebook Application Seminar, I have been busy working with Kok Wee and the Tutors on the grading of the FB assignment and also in preparing the Google Wave assignment.

I haven't had the chance to read through all the FB Application critiques quite as thoroughly as I would have liked, but I will re-read all of them over the next two weeks while I'm away in Bangkok.

Teaching CS3216 really keeps me on my toes because every batch is different.

Traditionally (i.e. for the last two batches), the 70% milestone points are like giveaways because every group will fastidiously ensure that they were satisfied. This year it's quite a mess and I decided to something never done before: get students to re-submit.

The nice thing about CS3216 is that it's a class I created and so I pretty much make the rules. More importantly, I get to change the rules along the way to adapt to surprises. I've never been a fan of dogma but it's not like I do stuff at whim and fancy either.

Why resubmission?

Reason is very simple: I have no intention of assessing students based on the three assignments: (i) FB assignment; (ii) FB app seminar and (iii) Google Wave assignment. These assignments are structured in so a way that students will LEARN stuff. As long as people learn, the objective is satisfied. The grades awarded are supposed to "punish" the idle ones who don't put in effort.

Most groups have put in A LOT of effort into the assignment and convinced me that they learnt something and so I felt that it would not be fair to punish them just because they were not kiasi and kiasu enough to get every single milestone point. Scoring for the milestone points is not function of intellect, it's merely a demonstration of diligence.

My hope is that everyone will finish the first three assignments reasonably well and all get reasonably high scores. The students will be assessed for CS3216 mainly on the Final Project.

I must say that I am very pleased with the FB application seminar this year. After three iterations, we've finally gotten it right (I have to admit that we really do it quite right the last two times). The presentations were nice and succinct and the critiques and ensuing discussions were good. Apparently students have been forced to think.

I tell my students that it's really fun being a prof -- because we get to do what we believe in. And it is in this spirit that CS3216 is conducted.

Henry asked if his group can do a Chrome plugin instead of the Google Wave assignment, the answer is yes.

Yecheng asked if he can swap the order of the Final Project and Google Wave assignment, i.e. do Final Project first. The answer is yes again (provided his GW and Final Project groups are the same).

Why not? :-)

Not that I'm a fan of Yes Man (starring Jim Carrey), but I think there's a cultural problem in our society where people ask too much for permission, rather than forgiveness. My policy for CS3216 is that pretty much anything reasonable and that complies with the high-level goals of CS3216 is possible - ask and ye shall receive.

If I should reject a request, it would be my responsibility to EXPLAIN why not. :-P

To conclude, learning is hard. And it is my belief that we are our own best teachers. So the whole structure of CS3216 is not so much in me trying to teach students stuff, but in me trying to encourage students to learn stuff on their own. When I see a post like this, it encourages me that I might just have done something right.

CS3216 doesn't seek so much to teach as to light a fire -- to convince students that they can do more than they thought they could do (before they took the class).

Yes, it's painful lah, but as they say "no pain, no gain". The reason why CS3216 works is that there's shared suffering. When you're suffering alone trying to decipher some obscure piece of code, you start asking yourself if you're an idiot. When you're sitting in COM1 with a dozen other students, it becomes an experience. Such are the mysteries of life. :-)

I would like to wish all students a very Happy Lunar New Year. While I will not be physically around to give angbaos, those who have not already gotten my comments on your FB app critiques can look forward to CNY "good luck" comments that you will be expected to respond to.

P.S. I was "supposed" to write about the FB app seminar this week, but I decide I would read through all the critiques once more in more detail first. Akan datang.

On Cloud Computing

While I typically blog AFTER the students have blogged, I felt pretty inspired today and I thought I would pen down my thoughts before I forget them.

I would like to thank Simone Brunozzi from Amazon for taking time to come talk to the class about Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cloud Computing in general.

The reason why we are deploying the class assignments on AWS and why I invited Simone to give a talk to the class is because I believe that cloud computing is future (and Amazon didn't pay me to say this). I'm saying this not because the technology is cool, but because it makes business.

Simple reason: it's annoying (and expensive) run a data center. :-P

I must admit that while I have a reasonably good idea of how the technology works 'cos my area of research is networking and distributed systems, I had never used a cloud computing service before until this semester.

I believe that it would be helpful for the students to understand how it works, because while many aspects are the same as traditional servers, there are also key differences. For example, persistent storage is something that requires a little more understanding and thought, i.e. should we put the data in S3, EBS or MySQL?

While students are expected to work mainly with EC2, I hope that the students will also use the opportunity (and free credits) to explore the other AWS services that Simone mentioned.

I'm not going to talk about the technical content of the talk since that's for the students to talk about and discuss. There are three things that I would like to highlight.

One, the conversion to cloud computing will not likely be an easy one. The reason is that people don't necessarily change just because something is better. Small companies probably don't need the full capabilities of the cloud; large companies are resistant to change.

The resistance is more often than not a human rather than a technical issue. Basically, change is scary because things can go wrong. Middle management in Asia is typically conservative.

This is the question: suppose they convince their boss to switch over to cloud computing and their company saves a lot of money, will they get a bigger paycheck? Suppose something goes wrong in the process - who's going to take responsibility?

The lesson here is that it's not enough to big something bigger and better. You've gotta convince the sucker to buy it. :-)

Next, I really really pleased by how Simone answered some of the questions. Basically, to almost all the questions of "how do we do it?", his answer was "it depends".

This underscores the importance of being flexible and understanding that life is complicated and that there are often different answers to the same question "what is the best way to make data persistent on AWS?" under different situations. In a nutshell, context matters.

Finally, I was very impressed by Simone's story about him advising the customer who had 200 EC2 instances to run his own distributed file system instead of using S3 or EBS (which would cost the customer more and increase AWS's profits).

This underscores the importance of integrity in doing business.

Many of my students will probably eventually end up starting their own businesses.

My wife does not have very many good things to say about the sorts of people she has come across in the corporate world. She said that integrity is severely lacking.

I hope that however that my students will learn from Simone's example and "do the right thing". Don't screw the customer to make a quick buck. Create value and build real businesses. :-)

The Paradox of Simplicity

CS3216 evolves over time.

We have had a lecture on "Principles of Software Engineering" since the first year.

The first year, it was guest lecture by Prof Stan Jarzabek. It was a good lecture -- but the non-programmers complained that it was too technical and they were completely lost.

Last year, Prof Stan was busy and so I did an abbreviated version of the lecture followed by a sharing session by three students, Zi Han, Wei Man and Justin. The sharing session was quite well-received but there were still complaints that the lecture was too technical.

So when it came to this year, I thought about what we should do and decided to keep the sharing session but do the lecture differently. Thanks Zi Han, Wei Man and Justin for coming down yesterday to do the sharing session.

What I had come to realize was that it's not very meaningful to cover the principles of software engineering that students are not likely to relate to in CS3216.

Software engineering is a complicated process and mostly relates to big systems. In CS3216, the focus is more on ideas and ideas, and while it would be preferable if students produce world-class and easily maintainable code, we have to be realistic about what can be accomplished in 13 weeks.

In this light, I decided to simplify and to focus on what is most likely relevant to the students here and now. I decided that it is important to talk about stuff that the students can relate to immediately even in their first assignment.

The simplification is evident on the number of principles we discussed in the lectures. Two years ago, there were six principles; last year, there were five; this year, I only talked about three of them. So much for dumbing down.

Some students seem to think that the stuff I mentioned: (i) modularity, (ii) abstraction and (iii) design for change are quite straightforward -- and they are right. It's mostly common sense actually.

The irony of life however is that many things are pretty simple and straightforward. Strangely enough, people often fail to do what is simple and straightforward.

For example, the following lecture on Time Management by Randy Pausch says pretty obvious things:

How many people can actually do it? Personally, I can't even manage some of those things.

In this sad state of affairs however is opportunity. Basically, this suggests that many people already know how to significantly improve their lives --- they just have to DO IT. :-)

Truthfully, one of the reasons why the lecture was the way it was is because of what I'd heard about how some of the groups are doing -- some groups were struggling to distribute the work, some groups didn't know how to start and others didn't know what to do with the non-programmers. It's a learning process for everyone. :-)

Sleep matters. Finally, I'm not always serious about everything I said in class. While it is true that people can do a lot more things if they don't sleep, I am not advocating that students should deprive themselves of sleep.

In fact, research has shown, and as Li Yen has kindly highlighted, sleep deprivation hurts performance.

In fact, it's more than just sleep. Some amount of balance and moderation is necessary for life in general. Many people focus exclusively on their careers to the detriment of the other parts of their lives (family, health, friends, etc.).

While I don't believe in well-roundedness and advocate focussing on developing one's strengths, I do believe that some amount of balance is necessary in leading our lives.

Our lives are pretty short. I should know. I actually feel quite old already. :-)