Change and Constancy - A Two-Month Life Summary
On September 19, 2014, at 22:30, I was dragging a suitcase half my weight, walking alone under the mottled tree shadows in the west district of USTC. Just a few hours ago, I was studying the knapsack problem: how to bring back as many valuable things as possible under the constraint of backpack volume.
At that time, only a few people knew I was back: the boss and colleagues in the group, my parents, and Zhang Jingning. Just a few days ago, the LUG buddies were still discussing whether I would come back in October: because I messed up the mirrors server, I still owe everyone a meal!
This was the original beginning of the life summary written on October 20, “Escape from the Activity Room“. But I felt it was inappropriate, so I changed it to “Escape from Microsoft”. At the beginning of this month, I changed my Renren cover photo to the staff group photo of SFD on September 20, just to commemorate the beginning of this year’s new life.
Attend Classes Diligently
My first change is to attend classes diligently. Before coming back from Microsoft, my mentor advised me to focus. Many times I did spread myself too thin, and as a result, I didn’t do well in anything. When my mentor said this, he originally wanted me to focus on my current research project, instead of looking around at unrelated research fields. I did focus, but not where my mentor hoped. The first year of my master’s degree is my last year in school, I should enjoy the last school life and find back the campus youth that quietly slipped away from me.
So I said goodbye to the decadent state of my junior year and attended classes seriously like a freshman. This semester, I have a total of 8 courses, and I didn’t skip any except for two. Seventeen teaching weeks have passed, and I haven’t handed in homework more than a week late, a record I only maintained in my freshman year. I never went to the study room during my undergraduate years, and my activity locations were always the dormitory and the School of Management. This semester, for the first time, I found out that the fifth floor of the library in the east district is a study room, and for the first time, I studied in the library, and it was also the first time I went to the second teaching building to study since my junior year.
There are probably two reasons for studying hard: first, after a year of research, I realized that my foundation is very poor, I don’t know the answer to many questions, and I still need to work hard to improve my posture level; second, I study with my girlfriend, get up and go to bed at the same time, naturally, I can’t live the life of a research monk who sleeps during the day and comes out at night. A friend asked on Renren “how to create opportunities to be with the girlfriend”, someone suggested “study together”, he replied “graduate students don’t study”, in fact, graduate students can also have study sessions.
Professor An Hong said that the graduate stage is mainly for research, and should not be like undergraduate “class and GPA first”. But I think the course is the best way to systematically understand a field. Reading books by myself will lack motivation and fall asleep after a while. And there are many details in the book that don’t need to be understood at the beginning. I remember the first time I read SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) as an undergraduate, I couldn’t stick to it after reading two chapters; then I watched the open class video recorded by MIT in 1986, the two professors (also the authors of the book) explained the essence of the problem, and I managed to finish it; then I went to read the book again, and I felt that I didn’t understand the first two chapters at all, even if I continued to read it hard, the effect would not be good. That is to say, for more difficult subjects, it’s more reliable to have a teacher lead the way.
Many people don’t like to go to class or read books, probably because they are influenced by the fragmented information on the Internet. These fragmented pieces of information expand the extension of our knowledge, but cannot increase the connotation of our knowledge; on the surface, we know everything, but when we think about it carefully, we don’t know the answer to many questions. As a person who works on the Internet, my mission is to connect you and me and share information, but my own attitude towards social networks is actually quite cautious. Because I need large chunks of time to think and do things.
#Why not to interrupt a programmer# (Source: Jobbole) Why not to interrupt a programmer (Source: Jobbole)
Whether it’s going to class, maintaining servers, writing code, writing blogs, reading papers, or having dinner, watching videos, chatting with my girlfriend on QQ, I’m used to focusing on one thing. I don’t have the compulsion to check unread messages, and there’s always a number in the upper right corner of many icons on my phone. Even when I’m walking, I’m so focused that I don’t see classmates passing by me (if I didn’t say hello to you, I’m sorry).
What’s the Use of a Girlfriend
My second change, I believe many people have already guessed. On the afternoon of November 14, I mentioned for the first time in an email to my boss that I had found a girlfriend. It is said that when Larry, a USTC alumnus in the group, saw this email, he was so excited that he slapped the table.
Reading
The book list for these two months (including books just finished, being read, and just started, of course, I can’t read so many books in two months):
Academic works:
Network Algorithmics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Designing Fast Networked Devices. I read the keynote slides by George Varghese on SIGCOMM’14 and found this book to be a great introduction to packet processing.
High Performance Browser Networking. Performance analysis and suggestions for WLAN, cellular network, TCP and HTTP(S) protocols.
A Guide to Cache Memory in Modern Processor Architecture (Chinese) http://home.ustc.edu.cn/~
shengjie/REFERENCE/Cache% 20Memory.pdf The Internet and Its Protocols: A Comparative Approach. Understand protocols such as MPLS, Multicast in commodity networks in a systematic way.
Network Congestion Control: Managing Internet Traffic. It is a book published in 2005, but the basic principles of congestion control does not seem to change.
Technical books:ShowStopper: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft. A biography of Microsoft’s creation of the NT system
Covert War: The Great Pursuit of Cybercrime, delving into the dark underworld of hackers, revealing the large-scale conflicts that erupted on the Internet between Russian cyber thugs and the American mafia
The Future of Code, Yukihiro Matsumoto: The past, present, and future of programming languages, multicore and concurrent programming, data storage technology in the era of big data
Leisure books:“The Light of Civilization” by Wu Jun
“The Old Regime and the Revolution” Why did the French Revolution happen
“The Most Brilliant Galaxy” A collection of Liu Cixin’s classic works (before The Three-Body Problem)
