Re: I want to contribute and chose right project for graduate thesis

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>]

On 2017-07-28, at 01:27, Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com> wrote:

> Ken Goldman wrote:
>
>> My 2 cents.
>>
>> Learning how to deal with huge egos and
>> understanding the culture of open source
>> projects is valuable - certainly not a waste
>> of time for a new engineer.
>
> Well, yeah. Actually it is not the huge egos
> that is the problem. What I menat was - some
> time one these lists and groups people have an
> attitude to newcomers that isn't good, either
> they are reluctant to give good answers, like
> they answer in very short sentences, *or* they
> do the opposite, write several pages with
> details which the newcomer won't understand
> much of, and then they start speaking among
> themselves and the newcomer obviously doesn't
> feel encouraged to proceed with the project.

I'm not sure whether I agree.  A short answer may be quite good.  It may
give a pointer - a starting point to learn.  And if someone doesn't get
it, they may always ask further questions.

>> I don't know whether it's thesis-worthy.
>
> Right. Like most other things it is better to
> learn that along the way. Many educations work
> like that way by the way. Like CS. They don't
> teach programming, at least not here they
> don't. It is just something you are expected to
> pick up while doing AI, databases, interfaces,
> and what have you...
>
> And it makes sense! Universities should be
> theory and practice that is oriented to the
> theory, not to the practice itself.

+1 from me.  May I hang this quotation on my office's door so that all
students can see it? ;-)

> Because practice is much easier, many, many
> people can do it and certainly anyone who has
> been thru "3" or "5 years" of all that theory
> and theory-practice. (I put the years within
> quotation marks because no one ever comples
> their education in time. Not because being
> lazy, mind you. If anyone would ever do that,
> people would ask, "hey, what is wrong with this
> dude?!")

Really?  I did two master's degrees, and both were finished JIT.  And
I'm not an exception - many, many of my colleagues did a similar thing.

> But when you are stuck in all that theory it
> sure is a lot of frustration :)

Well, in maths, theory is basically all you've got;-).

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski