First Day of the Semester

Today is the first day of the semester again, and I had the pleasure of being the first presenter in COMP 600, the noon PhD seminar series. It was a little bit chaotic because it was the first day and the food arrived later, so I lost about 10 to 15 minutes of my time, but in general I don’t think my presentation was all that bad. This year, there are evaluation forms, so I can read exactly how badly I did.

Obviously, I spent the last few days creating this presentation, which was based on my MS defense presentation, but much shorter and simpler. I finished the presentation on Sunday around noon (after an all-nighter), but then decided a few minutes before the presentation to cut a large but not that exciting part. I’m glad I did.

Other than that, I have worked a little on DrJava, though I didn’t manage to change our license and make a new release. I’ve also thought more about schedule generation, but I think I’m going to put that on a back-burner for a while again so I can do a final edit of my thesis and then submit it.

Update

About half of the feedback forms were pretty much useless to me, because they only included numbered ratings from 1 (good) to 5 (bad), and the audience seemed to be split evenly between people who liked my presentation and rated me with 1s and 2s, and people who didn’t like the presentation and dealt out 4s and 5s.

The most important comments for me probably were:

  • red on black not well visible (I should take into account that the
    projector’s contrast isn’t as good as my monitor’s)
  • still lots of text
  • needs more examples, if possible a demo
  • the invariant subtyping was a little dense on theory (I tried to
    stretch it out and make it easier, but it’s difficult to do that
    without spending a lot of time explaining subtyping in the lambda
    calculus)
  • include page numbers
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About Mathias

Software development engineer. Principal developer of DrJava. Recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Computer Science at Rice University.
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