SBR600: Reflection

During my time in SBR600 in this semester, as a CTY student, I kept asking myself if this is the right course for me. The reason is that, in CTY, I have learnt some scripting skills as well as some web developing skills, but none of the courses were about software development. Until I did my project version 0.1, there was a big question within myself, which was; why am I learning how to release software when I don’t even know how to build one?

I started my project “To Thumb? Or not to Thumb?” This whole idea of building kernel and repository and solving dependency problems was something seemed like a rocket science, made me wonder if there was a prerequisite course that I missed before taking SBR600. Professor Chris Tyler and Raymond Chan (in my OPS535 course) said this during a lecture (and they both happened to say this during the same week) that “No one is able to complete a job by him/herself in the today’s industry. One critical skill to acquire is learning to collaborate and cooperate with others.” That made me wake up and notice what I had not been noticing. Maybe this whole Fedora-ARM project thing is a rocket science, but no one told me that I had to understand and acquire knowledge on the all aspects of it. This is when I got motivated and had desire to be the part of the community.

Quite honestly, I still do not have clear idea of armv5tel architecture in many ways. But I believe that what SBR600 gave me to leave with is one of the most valuable knowledge that I acquired in my entire CTY program. I got a sense of and experienced how the Linux community works and evolves, even more fortunately, I had an honour to observe discussions between many Fedora-ARM developers in the IRC. I learned the importance of cooperating with others. Lastly and most importantly, I’ve learned that since computer science and IT industry continuously and rapidly evolves, just like Fedora and Firefox is upgrading itself with new versions every day, no knowledge is permanent; I have to continuously educate myself with up-to-date knowledge.

In the aspect of participating with classmates, unfortunately things that I’ve learned for my project was not relevant to most of other classmates project. Therefore, I’ve only participated with Mark Eamiguel, who is working on “Support beyond armv5tel architecture”, we collaborated with each other by making arrangements on who’s using cdot-beagleXM-0-3 during what times, to avoid interruption on our benchmarks. There was one night our works on that machine became useless since both of us were compiling at the same time which caused performance drop. We also gave each other tips on working with these remote systems, such as using application screen and command who.