Well, I’m back
by Mithrandir
I was busy. I nearly had no time left for blogging (in fact, I have blogged on the other blog — most articles are in Romanian but several have English versions — in several bursts).
I finished my Bachelor Studies. The thesis was called “Iogrind: I/O Operations Analysis For Improved Application Startup” and I had great fun while working with Michael Meeks (via email) and Răzvan Deaconescu (my supervisor).
With this I was invited to talk an Linux Plumbers Conference in California. Unfortunately, due to budget and some other problems I was unable to participate.
However, the thesis also offered me an opportunity to work full-time at Mozilla. Which I denied because of some incompatibility of plans: I wanted to pursue a Masters Degree. They proposed me to give up this pursuit in exchange for other benefits but the educational system in Romania didn’t quite allow me to do this properly.
Anyway, it was not the first offer I refused. Google and Facebook come to mind as being refused more than once. They offered a full time position which was incompatible with my plans.
Still, I got hired during the last summer. Initially as an intern at IXIA. At the end of summer I accepted a full time position. Thus I came to work in the Linux Kernel Development Team. As a result, I have submitted two patches to the upstream (both related to speeding up ifconfig).
I enrolled myself into the Artificial Intelligence Master at my University. The research I’m doing there is concerned with real time self organizing agents and I’m doing it in Haskell right now.
I have done other small projects in Haskell. They are all on GitHub.
I dedicated a lot of time activating in ROSEdu and it was gainful. The most relevant part of the activity is the Techblog, a blog containing technical articles written by members of the community. A part of the plan is to involve other people in posting there. We have several series of articles planned (debugging, git, build systems, etc).
Lastly but not least, this week I participated (and co-organized) the first functional summer school (in Romanian unfortunately) in our University (and as far as I know in Romania as well). I held three talks: about parallelism in Haskell, about testing in Haskell and about graphical user interfaces in Haskell. Other talks included type synthesis, coroutines and a short introduction to Erlang.
In short, this is what I have done during the last year. Many lessons were learned (some from other activities which were not presented and I won’t cover them).
These lessons will be put to good use in the future.
Anywhere are you posting, from time to time, I will lecture your entries. It’s interesting what you are doing and I am interested to watch for your achievements. Personally, I am glad that you want to pursue an academic and a research career. I saw that you say No to several big names in the IT industry, but where do you see you working over 5 years ? In Romania or abroad ? What do you think, is Romania the country that can assure you the conditions for accomplishing your objectives ?
Well, there are several paths to follow for the future. Some of them involve working in Romania, some of them working at big names or doing research somewhere.
I understand only too well two of the issues you encountered: first, having multiple blogs or even multiple sections can be cumbersome, time and energy consuming. That’s why I dropped all my previous content.
Second, blogging systems are not really ready for blogging. I find this amazing, and trying to convince wordpress to do what I want is really too much. I have my own VPS and I intend to replace wordpress with something intelligent, for a change. Now I’ll probably have the time, since I decided to quit real life and get back on the technical side of things. :)