July 4, 2022

So Much for Consistency

It looks like my last one of these was nearly a month ago. There isn’t a real reason why I’ve neglected to write every week beyond the fact that I got lazy and didn’t feel like writing, and that snowballed into a longer absence than I had hoped.

Anyway, most of the past month was spent working on finalizing my user study (surprise). The two undergrad “interns” in the lab were nice enough to take part in some initial runs, and I got some very valuable feedback. Speaking of summer undergrads, I have to say that I’m super impressed by both of them; I sure wasn’t doing what they were doing back when I was in undergrad. I’m glad they seem to be enjoying their time in the lab as well.

I was also sidetracked by preparing for, taking, and then anxiously awaiting an interview that fell into my lap right as I came back from ICSE. Unfortunately the process didn’t end in a way that I would have liked, but it was nonetheless interesting. That said, this was probably the most frustrating experience I’ve ever had in living memory with a recruiter, so I’d be happy to stay away from this company for a while.

During my last meeting with Gail, she suggested that we try to get a paper submission out of my thesis. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, since supervisors want to publish, and some amount of publishable work appears to be what many supervisors look for. However, I’m not too sure if my work so far is publishable; could I see myself submitting it? Sure, I could submit a blank piece of paper and that would be “submitting” something. Publishing it, however, is another matter entirely. Gail’s judgement hasn’t been wrong so far, so I guess I’ll spend the rest of my time here running the user study, collecting data + analyzing it, and preparing a paper submission in parallel. As for which conference we’re targeting, the deadline for ICSE 2023 is at 4:59:59am on Sept 2, and if we can’t make that, I guess we’ll submit to ICPC ¹. I guess getting to go to ICSE in 2023 would be nice, I haven’t been to Australia before.

That’s it for me, back to trying to think of a decent title for my thesis and paper…