Student Blogs
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. |
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Architecture Midpoint:
So I’m just about halfway through the summer course in the MS Software Engineering program – Architecture. So far, it has been a very interesting course. In the first half, we’ve had basically 5 weeks of continuous research and reporting on various architectural styles. For example, my team and I researched pipes-and-filters, service-oriented, and event-based styles. Following this, we conducted a 2 week analysis of competing architecture options to build the best system software within a sea buoy (yes, literally, how would you architect a system to put on buoys floating in the sea?).
Needless to say, this is been a lot of work, and has felt a bit overwhelming with the amount of information we’ve had to cover. Looking back, though, I can't really see a different method of quickly exposing people to a wide range of architecture options in a short time. This was probably the best way to give us a survey of various architectural styles. Additionally, as you learn more about any particular architecture, you definitely start to see what pieces of the architectures are fundamental to each one's success or failure.
Overall, this past “mini-semester” has been pretty different than the others, in that there’s been more research-based. I'm pretty excited, though, about the next mini-semester, when we will apply what we learned here towards our "Movie Recommender" product. This is a web-based application that recommends movies a lot like Netflix does. We will be figuring out the architecture for that project with a lot less constraints than we had when describing the architectures in the first half-semester. I think this will end up being pretty cool.
posted by Nick Lynn @ 3:04 PM
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Attending the Class of 2008 Commencement Ceremony at the main campus in Pittsburgh
Last month I joined more than a dozen Carnegie Mellon West students and faculty who flew to
I flew in on a Friday morning, took a shuttle into downtown and met up with my classmates to do all the touristy stuff in and around
Of course we couldn’t miss a visit the campus store to fill up our reservoir of CMU paraphernalia (which we can’t so easily get at the west coast campus), and had a nice dinner with CMU West students only and attended various pre-graduation cocktail dinners. The next morning, amidst grayish weather, we joined thousands of other Tartans in Carnegie Mellon’s 111th commencement ceremony. Keynote speaker was 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Al Gore who pulled again his joke-introduction of “Hi, I am Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States” after which he talked about us being the generation that can change and tackle the environment issues we face today. However, Al Gore’s appearance was almost overshadowed by a short surprise-appearance of the CMU professor Randy Pausch whose inspiring “Last Lecture” on achieving your childhood dreams after being diagnosed with cancer became an internet sensation last year. Again, Randy inspired the students (and myself) about life’s purpose of finding passion and following your passion as well as the love for the people that matter most to you. I am glad that I was able to see and hear from Randy Pausch myself, for I have been inspired by his last lecture months before (click here if you haven’t seen it yet).
It was a very fun weekend out of town, and I thought that it was very worth the money to spend for such a short weekend. Of course, the harder part now is to concentrate on my last two months at CMU West on my practicum without being fooled into thinking that I am already done. Ah, senioritis.
posted by Minh Nguyen @ 2:52 PM
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