How many times you put your best effort in making a project only to be ridiculed during the presentation with words like “This is shit”.”WTF is this” by the teachers. OK OK! I am exaggerating, but it is a truth that students who put their best don’t get their reward. Most of such students put their sincere effort just because they like their work and not just for marks. To add insult to injury, those who copy-paste the projects get great reviews.
The situation is no different in Computer Science branch too. We loose hundreds of such talents students just because they became de-moralized after poor feedback for their project by the faculty. They should realize that hard-work in college hardly pays off. They should put their coding efforts in competitions like “Google Code Jam”, “CodeChef” or some open-source projects.
Now the million dollar question is “How to handle the college projects”? Let me explain with an example.
Project: Create a source Control Management or Revision Control System for efficient code management for single person project.
Technology: Python with SQLite for client.
Additional Information: There need not be a central repo to push the changes, local commits are enough. The name of the binary should be srcs or “Simple Revision Control System“
Creating the Project:
In real world development, people would ask you to make tons of documents like SRS, Technical Specification etc before moving on to coding. These things simply don’t exist in colleges. All you need to do for your project to be ready is shown below.
You need to run the following commands on any Debian based distro (probably Ubuntu)
$ sudo apt-get install bzr
$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/bzr /usr/bin/srcs
….. and it’s done. Now let’s start using it
Creating the repository
$ cd ~ && mkdir code && cd code
$ srcs init
Creating files
$ touch file1.c
$ touch README
Adding and committing
$ srcs add file1.c README
$ srcs commit file1.c README -m "First Commit"
So your project part is complete. Now come let’s handle the typical vivas
Conversation 1:
Teacher: Why have you used Python?
You: Python is _______________(put all sorts of Python advocacy here)__________________
Teacher: What. Explain it clearly!
You: So that you can’t make the head or tail of the codebase.
Conversation 2:
Teacher: Explain your project briefly!
You: My project is to create a system to manage the code. Keep revisions, find the differences between two commits
Teacher: How to keep differences?
You: I save the code at regular intervals, or say commit it to the repo, so that I can access any file any time if I make a mistake
Teacher: Why the **** do you need to make such a big software to keep copies. Can’t you just use “Save As(s)” every time you need revision of a file?
You: *Facepalm*
10 Comments
November 13, 2009 at 9:47 AM
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November 13, 2009 at 3:28 PM
As for those who do real hard work in college, should also take time watching Steve Jobs iPod introduction, or some tech talks on youtube to pump up themselves to present it nicely
November 13, 2009 at 11:41 PM
Correct, most of them can be split into two types – “Those who work hard solely for marks” and “Those who work hard for self-satisfaction”.
Even the second type get demoralised seeing the first type getting more attention and appraisal.
November 13, 2009 at 11:28 AM
Something tells me this happened at MIT =D
November 13, 2009 at 2:40 PM
Yes. It surely happened. (This is a real incident with lots of spices added intentionally)
November 13, 2009 at 2:54 PM
It does happens in IITA too, i should say in all the Indian colleges.
November 13, 2009 at 3:25 PM
So instead of making a real vcs someone just made a symlink to bzr and tried to get through? that’s how I get it.
Intro part is true, but severe damage happens to people in English projects at my college where they need to move out, do some ground work in Bangalore, analyse the data and present. Its to be done in group, that happens to be 1 factor where ppl fail. The the teacher too looks for weird perfectness like – font size, line height should be 1.5, some particular format for bibliography, etc, etc. And then she rejects many projects right before endsem.
Since I had someone in my group whose father is a prof at IIM, we got an awesome intro done by him, and good grades, I say wtf!
Aren’t they encouraging us to escape the effort of doing it on our own by expecting superb quality, while ignoring the fact that there are many students in the college who haven’t been through a quality English class in their school days.
Anyways I haven’t been though a CS project presentation yet… hoping to get someone who understands my project
November 14, 2009 at 5:57 AM
8th sem?
November 14, 2009 at 11:14 PM
Yes! But it is valid for any sem.
November 14, 2009 at 10:02 PM
Oh!! bravo bhaiya bravo….
I, myself, am currently learning version control system. And listening to comments like “why to make such a big software to keep copies. Can’t you just use Save As(s) every time you need revision of a file?” really really really pisses me off. Instead of trying to understanding the functionality, they are putting up child-like questions!!