The CS Grad Job and Interview Guide, which has lived and proven
useful for far longer than I ever expected it to! Includes additions and new
perspectives since my own search in 2013, including on the SLAC market and
industry research positions.
Anonymous Review at
SSBSE: Back
in 2014 Shin Yoo and I experimented with anonymous review when we chaired
SSBSE, and wrote a blog post explaining why. Some people have found it
useful, though it is now of course getting a bit old (aren’t we all!).
I’m pleased to note that anonymous review has since become the standard at Software
Engineering venues.
Beyond that, there was a period of time where I blogged. Perhaps I will again, someday. In the meantime, I keep
whatever posts I have around primarily for archival purposes.
My collaborators and I started GenProg, “Genetic/Generic Program Repair
(Depending on Whom You Ask)”, in 2008, maybe a month or so after GitHub was
launched. My grad school research group was hip and up-to-date in our
development tools, primarily evidenced by the fact that we used Subversion
instead of CVS. Even in 2011, when we started putting together what became the
ManyBugs dataset, it was
still completely reasonable to find open source projects to study by trolling Sourceforge. Which is exactly what we did.
It’s summer conference time, and Phil Guo recently posted a handy how-to on “Attending Professional Conferences as a Newcomer”, which reminded me to finish this one up. His post is probably more actionable; here, I elaborate on a related piece of advice in a way that is hopefully complementary.
I loved speaking at the inaugural Papers We Love conference, co-located with Strange Loop, in the disarmingly cool city of St. Louis. I’d never been to or spoken at a PWL event before, but I’ve had a great time getting to know the community. The basic idea is a bunch of meetups where participants (a mix of industry and academic types) present/discuss academic papers that they, well, love.
I often write papers with students, or read students’ papers to provide comments, and I find myself saying the same things over and over, especially the first time out.* So: here’s a blog post I can point them to to (hopefully!) save us all some time and trouble. I plan to update it as I remember more things I say repeatedly.
[ETA: the Townhall will start at 5:45 in the Glass Oaks room, and will include time for discussion and questions, as well as a panel of experts and senior members of the community who will address the issue.]
Two of my ongoing professional quests are to provide insight the processes of
CS academia to those who would benefit from it and to increase the number of
people who meet me and say “Oh, I know about you! Jean Yang mentioned you on her blog!” To those ends, over at her
blog, Jean and I collaborated
on some advice to prospective CS PhD students choosing between potential
advisors, with lessons from our favorite reality TV show.
Hey, fellow Harvard alums: This year, when you get a ballot for the Harvard Board of Overseers Election in the snail-mail, instead of throwing it away without looking at it: don’t. Instead: vote.
SSSG[1], the ISR SE program’s weekly research symposium, typically features the SE PhD students (and, less commonly, faculty) presenting either their work, or surveys of the work of others. From time to time, though, we go a bit meta. This week, I gave a talk on talks, specifically on how I approach the task of structuring a research presentation [2]. I was asked, and am happy, to send out/link to/otherwise circulate the slides. The tricky bit is that they’re heavy on illustrative/goofy pictures and light on, you know, content. I therefore added a bit of blog-based commentary to go with them (not the full talk, but enough to hopefully render the slides a bit more sensible). The notes roughly follow the slides.
Emery peer pressured me to blog, presumably rather than ranting entirely in Facebook posts, which is where a moderately shorter version of this first appeared. I admit this does feel a hair more legitimate. At least, I feel less compelled to apologize for the length.)
As PC co-chair for the Symposium for Search-Based Software Engineering in 2014, I participated in the Organizing Committee’s discussion about and decision to implement double-blind submission review for the main research track. On behalf of the Organizing Committee, I composed a post explaining the reasoning behind the experiment. That post was moved around as it became less relevant to the conference (…after reviews were concluded). Since more than two people have since asked for a link to it, it seemed reasonable to reproduce it here.
