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February 16, 2010

What I'm doing now

So what I do lately is I work for a company in Cambridge, MA that has a big XQuery engine for searching "semi-structured" databases. That is, we use language technology to allow people to write nifty searches.

I had some other interesting job offers, but I took this one because (a) it was in the Boston area, which is where I wanted to be at the time and (b) I wanted to get behind one central product and contribute some programming-language knowledge to it. I was surprised to discover a company that would let me do both.

As part of what how we're improving the product just now, we're building a parallelizing compiler for relational algebra—roughly the sort of stuff that titilates me as a langauge engineer, and tangentially (at least) related to some of my thesis work.

Since it's a company trying to compete against others, I probably won't be blogging much about what I'm doing at work, but I still hope to keep this blog active and post researchy notes here.

July 7, 2009

Thesis submitted

So I've been rather busy. The first bit of news is, I submitted a thesis. Warning: it has not been examined and may be full of errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or ill-advised conclusions.

The thesis turned out better than I'd hoped, in the sense that all four major pillars of the work were also accepted to conferences (the papers are "Links: Web Programming without Tiers," "The Essence of Form Abstraction," "A Located Lambda Calculus," and "The Script-writer's Dream: How to Write Great SQL in Your Own Language and Be Sure It Will Succeed").

The night I printed it, I was elated, walking to the printer to collect my final copy, knowing I had done it—created some programming language features, written a 180-page thesis, persevered. In a couple of months I'll defend it, warts and all, and then perhaps I'll be completely finished. But it's downhill from here. I think.

Update: The final version has now been submitted, and the above link points to the latest version.

June 1, 2009

Quick beard note

Ahem.

It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism. ... “He’s got this beard that appears and disappears,” says Steven Rattner, one of the leaders of President Obama’s automotive task force.

Emphasis mine.

May 9, 2009

Apologies

It's very disappointing when someone gets up to do a talk and starts with an apology about the quality of the slides, or even the work itself. In the audience, we expect to see the presenter's best. A talk is, in many ways, a final outcome of the research work, not an intermediate state, and so it needs to be, simply, the best you can do.

You never tune in to your favorite TV show to see a disclaimer like this scroll across the screen:

Tonight's show is not going to be very funny and includes lots of shots of the outside of the house. That's because the writer was hung over all week and one of the actors turned up an hour late because the car wouldn't start—you know how that is!! We're really sorry and we promise that next week's show will be better.

TV shows, like academic talks, are performances, and final products—rather than working products—of the work that went in to produce them.

"The best you can do" doesn't have to be the best thing ever. There's a range in every community, and that's part of life. If someone gives a mediocre presentation one day and a better one another day, we'd say he or she improved. But we never adjust our estimation of someone's work because of excuses.

When you know you've done suboptimal work, or you're not fully prepared, it's best just to press on and give the best performance you can. Maybe your slides are crap—either skip some, or clarify them in words, or redraw them on a whiteboard, or something. Don't just apologize and expect the audience to swallow something bitter-tasting. It may be important to characterize what you've done modestly, for example, being clear about what problems you have and haven't solved, but that's quite different from an apology. You might give a talk where you say, "We tried to solve these three problems but we haven't really solved any of them." And maybe this failure is even because of desultory work; it still might be worth giving a talk and passing on what you've learned. "Here's why these problems are hard," you could say.

Apologies are important, in general, to signal that you know you've made a mistake. In a relationship of trust, when you've messed up, you need to acknowledge it; otherwise your confidantes may think the bad behavior was typical of you, or that you would do it again in the same situation. Such a relationship might be an intimate one—say you forgot your lover's birthday—or it could be a working relationship—the writer on the sitcom, above, who showed up for work hung over, was trusted by his co-workers to give a strong effort on the show. That he turned in dodgy work, causing the show to come out crap, is a mistake worthy of an apology. The apology allows you to regain trust, and of course many mistakes are forgivable. An apology signals that you learned something from the mistake, and so others can risk trusting you again.

Contrariwise, TV viewers are not in a relationship of trust with the production team. They want a damn good show with no buts about it. Anything else will simply drive them elsewhere—likewise, the audiences of technical and academic talks.