Thursday, June 15, 2006

The Smiths

I met with two professors at the Other university in north carolina with whom I've been collaborating off and on for quite a while. Let's call this pair "The Smiths." I took a course they taught a few years back, at which point, I found a nifty way to take one of their programs and make it much faster. So, I've re-written the core of this one program and met with them to talk about getting the revisions working properly -- in fact, I met with them a month ago, and realized that I had to go back and rewrite a substantial portion of the code to make it fast enough that it was worthwhile.

So in the past month, I would work on my dissertation during the 8 to 5 block, and then put in a couple of hours on writing this program. I called it "pleasure coding." I also put in some time on the weekends, too.

Anyways, it's working.

So I met with the Smiths yesterday along with several members of their lab, and one former member of their lab who is now working for a company I'll call Pork. If I were looking for a job in industry, Pork would be on my list. In fact, I will likely consider industry at some point, and when I do, I'll probably think about Pork.

Back to the story. Met with the Smiths and hashed out some details about which versions were where and how should we go about merging all of the code together into one source. At the end of the meeting, I was to combine the code from the various branches to the source into the code that I had been working on. I would then give that code to one of the Smiths' lab members.

So that's what I did today. I've sent the code, and we'll do some regressoin testing to make sure it's working properly, and we'll start distributing it. I'm psyched.

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