Avinash Meetoo: Blog

Time has come for me to leave the University of Mauritius. I have already given my notice and I’ll be leaving at the end of August after having worked as a lecturer in the Computer Science department for more than three years.

The main reason I’m leaving is that I am currently trying to obtain a visa for a foreign country but I’ll only have a definite answer in a few weeks… If I do obtain the visa, then we’ll have to move by the end of the year at latest.

Of course, there is an element of risk. If I do not obtain the visa, which is perfectly possible, I’ll have to get a new job in Mauritius. To be frank, I’ve not started searching yet.

Some people have been telling me that I should have kept my job as lecturer and then leave impromptu. I can’t do this because I don’t want to abandon my students in the middle of an academic year.

On being a lecturer

Being a lecturer is fantastic.

I love sharing what (little) I know to receptive students. I love having to always learn new things to keep the students awake. I love browsing and stumbling upon something that I immediately want to blog on and share with my students the next day. And I love having students who know what a university is and understand that they need to work hard to pass.

Another positive is that I also have a bunch of colleagues who share (more or less) my philosophy on teaching and having fun and we have managed to work on some cool projects during the past three years.

Of course, there are also some things I don’t like at the university like the lack of resources, the enormous workload imposed on us as compared to other universities and the pathetic Internet connection available.

But the one thing that bothers me most is the lack of passion and/or creativity and/or intelligence shown by some people. I guess outsiders may find this situation funny but I can tell you it’s really tough… Sometimes, you feel like having spent the whole day in a parallel universe where things look familiar but where few things happen as logic would dictate.

Some background

I come from a family of teachers. I would say that 75% of my family has done or is still doing some teaching either at secondary or tertiary level. Since I was a kid, my house was always filled with books and people willing (when they were not mad at me!) to explain things to me. My parents bought a set of encyclopedia when I was a kid and my favorite pass-time was to pick one of the books and spend an hour reading some articles more or less chosen at random. As a matter of fact, this is what I do now when I have some spare time except that I do it using my mobile phone and Wikipedia. (PS to my students: this is how you become knowledgeable.)

I was extremely good in school as I intuitively knew how to study and cruised. I obtained a scholarship to France where I studied for five years. And there too, I had no big problems being top until Christina and I realized that there were more important things in life as (only) being first in class…

I always felt that I was born to teach. I love to communicate. And share. Hence this blog I think (by the way, I wonder how people can manage in 2008 without blogging?!?)

When I returned to Mauritius in 1998, I started working as a lecturer at the Mauritius Chamber of Commerce & Industry for about six years and then joined the University of Mauritius where I have been working for the past three and a half years.

Awesome!

People who know me personally know I don’t like false modesty at all. So I am going to be honest and say that, for the past ten years, I have been an awesome, chill, cool, fun, exciting and daring teacher! Of course, I didn’t come up with those adjectives myself. Rather, they are what many of my students have told me over the past ten years. To be honest, some students have also told me that I am too elitist and too severe in marking (and not at all tolerant vis-à-vis stupid people.)

But I have to make something clear: I did not become awesome, chill, cool, fun, exciting and daring just like that. I spent days and days and nights and nights learning and practicing Computer Science as well as I could and find ways to restitute my knowledge in such a way that students could make sense of it all without falling asleep. Sometimes I felt so drained, at 2:00 in the morning after having uploaded a lecture I had just prepared, that I couldn’t sleep. But even so, at 8:30 the next morning, I was in my class doing my best to be a Jerry Lewis (lite) / Albert Einstein (lite) hybrid. And my students loved it. Me too.

All in all, I have loved being a lecturer at the University of Mauritius.

Big thanks to all my friends there. And lots of thanks to my students with whom I have spent so many hours of intense intellectualism and pleasure

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written by avinash

I’ve just come across an inspiring blog entry with the thought-provoking title You don’t know that programming language. The authors argues that knowing a programming language is very different from knowing of a programming language.

Personally, I know of C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, LISP, Scheme and Objective-C. But do I really know them perfectly? The answer is a big NO. For instance:

• I don’t know about setjmp in C.
• Ditto about partial template specialization in C++.
• Ditto about the Classloader in Java.
• Ditto about accumulation loops in Python.
• Ditto about advanced metaprogramming techniques in Ruby.
• Ditto about macros in LISP.
• Ditto about continuations in Scheme.
• Ditto about posing in Objective-C.

But this is not a big problem according to the blogger. What is important instead is to have the right aptitudes to learn those things if ever the need arises. He mentions that one only has to master the essentials like algorithms, design patterns, etc. and the rest will follow (if needed.)

I believe he is right.

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written by avinash

I’ve just come across a very interesting and deep transcript of a talk by Clay Shirky on Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. Here is my favorite part:

It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

You bet, Clay!

Personally, I prefer reading a nice online article on technology, trying to make sense of it, suddenly getting the point and feverishly write something in the same vein on my own blog than sitting in front of the TV spending hours being passive and eating peanuts.

I believe that TV as we know it will die in the near future. Instead we’ll all use Pay-per-view and we’ll watch TV only when we want to waste some time doing nothing productive. The rest of the time, we’ll be in front of our nice Linux- or Mac OS X-based computer (Windows does not exist in my future…) educating ourselves… and others in the process.

(Photo courtesy of Mary Hockenbery)

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written by avinash

I am happy to announce that the Mediacom Studio website, www.mediacomstudio.com, has just been created by Christina and myself.

Mediacom Studio is a state-of-the-art audio and video production facility for Communication Studies students at the University of Mauritius. The studio will be fully operational for the 2008-2009 academic year. The studio has been funded by one agency of the UNESCO to promote the development of professional journalism in Mauritius.

The project was conceived by Christina and was approved by the UNESCO in 2007.

My contribution to the whole project was to help Christina select the equipment to acquire for the studio. This was a tough exercise as we were constrained by the budget and what equipment we could order in Mauritius. Nevertheless, we managed to come up with a very balanced and functionally rich list of equipment in my opinion:

• Apple iMac computers with Leopard, iLife ‘08 and iWork ‘08
• Panasonic HDC-SD5 HD camcorders with tripod and lighting kit
• Olympus WS-300M audio recorders with external microphone
• Sennheiser PC151 noise canceling headsets with microphone

Initially, the students will use iMovie ‘08 for video editing. This is what I use at home and I find it excellent for beginners. We have also acquired one license of Final Cut Express for those students who want to use a more professional video editing software.

For viewing their creations, the students will be able to transfer their rendered files to an Apple TV connected to a Philips LCD TV. Additionally, they’ll be able to post their movies online on www.mediacomstudio.com for discerning people like you to enjoy…

Phew.

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written by avinash

I have just come across a great article by Alex Iskold entitled Top 10 Traits of a Rockstar Software Engineer. It is a must read for all aspiring software engineers out there… especially those who are still learning the skills in a university.

The 10 traits he mentions are:

1. Loves To Code
2. Gets Things Done
3. Continuously Refactors Code
4. Uses Design Patterns
5. Writes Tests
6. Leverages Existing Code
7. Focuses on Usability
8. Writes Maintainable Code
9. Can Code in Any Language
10. Knows Basic Computer Science

Phew! What can I say more? Apart from telling all of you to read the article thoroughly and to pay special attention to the various books he refers too.

Priceless.

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written by avinash