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MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track Blog
 | Rahul is a full-time MS Software Engineering, Technical Track student. He loves traveling, trekking, swimming and is a complete movie buff. |
 | Anthony is a 2nd year part time student in the MS Software Engineering, Technical track program and works at OSIsoft as a Software Engineer. He loves spending time with his family, hiking, biking, gardening, cooking, and sometimes photography. |
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Suma is an alumna of the MS Software Engineering, Technical Track program. A Mechanical Engineering undergrad, she loves writing and is passionate about music, shopping and dogs. |
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Minh is a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft and alumnus of the MS Software Engineering program. He is also a Vietnamese community activist, a cat-lover and passionate fan of film music. |
 | Nick is a Software Engineer at Google and a first-year grad student at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. He loves hiking, gaming, and both really extremely good and extremely bad movies. |
Monday, May 7, 2007
The Gathering
Touted as mid-year checkpoint for our entire cohort, remote or not, to flock back to the Carnegie Mellon West campus at the NASA Ames Research Center and to see and meet each other again is the event that we simply refer to as “The Gathering.” It’s a two-day happening each spring where all students of our Class of 2008 take the long pilgrimage back home to sunny Mountain View, CA in search for two things: communal spirituality and architectural guidance.
Okay, fine, maybe I am dramatizing this too much, but the idea is still the same, as the Gathering serves two purposes: first, it’s an opportunity for our entire cohort as well as the rest of the Carnegie Mellon West community to see and meet each other again, while it also serves as a kick-off to the new Software Architecture semester that we are about to start this May.
Because anywhere from 30%-40% of our cohort consists of remote students all across the nation (and sometimes even across the globe), we do not often get to see and meet each other. In fact, the last time that our class met in its entirety was during orientation weekend last August, so it was very refreshing to have all the students gather again. Some remote teams that have been working together very closely via conference bridges and LiveMeeting sessions last semester finally met in person this weekend.
Since Carnegie Mellon West’s curriculum puts a strong emphasis on team-building and other “soft” skills, a variety of guest speakers were invited on campus to present some interesting topics that one might not expect from a degree in software engineering. We had the founders from EnneBusiness Solutions present about the Enneagram of Personality introspections (a personality and character assessment through self-observation) and actually conduct a workshop to see how the enneagram can be analyzed in our newly-formed teams.
Stanford Professor (and author of “Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up”) Patricia Madison came to talk about the art of improv and comedy and conducted a variety of interactive games to discover and spur the creativity of our minds, as she explained how this mindset can be applied to our professional work to enhance creativity and team communication. Personal fitness trainers from Total Fit Solutions also came over and worked with us (or rather, made us work) through an hour of sometimes grueling athletic exercises that one could do in the office (the workshop was appropriately titled “My Desk is my Gym”).
To top it all off, we were all bused to downtown San Jose to have a dinner at a brewery. Afterwards, we enjoyed ourselves and shared good laughs at a comedy show at night. As you can imagine, despite the schedule being fairly busy, it provided ample opportunities to mingle, socialize and get to know your fellow classmates.
The second purpose of the Gathering was to officially kick-off the Software Architecture semester. We were conveniently introduced to our new team right at the beginning of the weekend to allow us to get to know each other through the above-mentioned workshops and games. A senior architect from Yahoo! provided us with an insightful talk about the roles of an architect as well as a variety of architectural decisions that were taken at Yahoo! as it embraced the Web 2.0 and AJAX wave. In addition, another talk that I thoroughly enjoyed was a presentation from Mark Srebnik, a building architect, as he described his work in planning, designing, and architecting a hospital as well as his iterative approach in interacting with the customer. The similarities between software architecting and building-architecting were striking, and I am glad to see that software engineers are not the only beings out there who claim to be masters at planning and designing but seldom deliver a product that actually looked like the first signed-off blueprint/Visio diagram!
As the weekend winded down, and remote students slowly checked out of their NASA lodges, a few of us took the opportunity to participate in a photo shoot for the new Carnegie Mellon West brochure, played frisbee on the big lawn in perfect California weather, or simply embarrassed ourselves in attempting to beat Tom, the only game developer in our class, in playing Dance Dance Revolution (aka DDR) on the Playstation upstairs. With a little bit of nostalgia, we realized that the entire Class of 2008 wouldn’t see each other again until the next year’s Gathering. At the same time, we feel refreshed and excited to start the new semester.
Until then, happy architecting!
Next time: Software Architecture Before and After (Part I)
posted by Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley @ 12:18 PM
