Semester I - 2010/2011

The teaching experience last semester was marvelous for me. It was a honor to stand in front of so-called Indonesia's smart & brilliant students for about a half semester. However, the excitement to teach Programming Foundations to the students also posed some challenges.

Challenges, written randomly & unstructured:
- Skills were varied
The profile of the students were varied, some of them already exposed to programming for years with exceptional achievements, some of them had a bit experience and the rest had no prior experience at all in programming. Teaching a subject for a group of people with different skills such this is a bit tricky. If I explained something slowly in details, the students who already mastered the subject will get bored easily while if I explained only the concept the other students may feel lost in space.


- Student: Why should I learn this?
Imagine you just got graduated from senior high school, proud to be accepted in a good university, overflowed with the euphoria then you got flooded with a creature called Java while you don't have any experience in programming. I can imagine it can be very frustrating for some students. You learned about class, objects, arrays, iterations, recursive functions and you end up in a situation to questioning all of the concepts you just learned, "Why do I have to learn all of this?" In practice, I would say many students will feel that the course is too abstract and extremely boring. In order to trigger up their motivation, we need to show something that we can do with the programming thingy in the real world e.g. make an useful & fun application/software as examples/ course assignments. But um..maybe we should try to use Greenfoot next semester as advised by Mas Rizal Fathoni?


- Thinking recursively
Not everybody can plug in to the recursive paradigm easily. Moreover, in my opinion learning recursive topic with Java is painful. I think it is best to learn recursive paradigm by using programming languages which use functional paradigm e.g. LISP. I'm grateful back in my undergrad study they taught me LISP for one semester. Yes, one semester to build the sense and mindset to understand recursive paradigm.

- Grading
Sometime ago, a fellow lecturer wrote in an email saying that after some periods of teaching he can determine which student may pass/ fail the course and grading is just a matter to justify whether the student will earn A, A-, B+ , etc I have to say that I experienced the same feeling as well. As for me, it is not necessarily true that a student with an A is absolutely better than a student with B+, B- or C. It's just a grade anyway, and there are many factors which contribute to a grade. Even in an exam, you cannot judge the full potential of a student. However, a good student tends to do well in an exam. But again, don't judge a student by looking only to his grades.

- Do they understand?
Reading student's "faces" is important, I need to know whether my explanation is clear enough to them. Sometime if I see many of them seem puzzled, I will try to explain something slower than before. However, I cannot ensure that every students always understand about every single concept that I delivered. If I may cite my undergrad lecturer's advice, Inggriani Liem, "read again about the topic in the afternoon while drinking a cup of tea and grabbing a piece of bread". Yes, the bottomline is,some concepts need more time to sink in your head.

- This is not my place!!
After several weeks/months some students will think, oh man this is not a place for me. Programming is not for me. I hate programming. Programming sucks etc. Well this is not a situation everybody wants to undergo, however this is a concrete situation which often happens. Computer science is not just about programming, however, still, programming skills are essential for computer science students.

- Mutual understanding
Speaking in front of others is never easy, especially for a shy guy like me *haha*. But fortunately I'm confidence enough to talk about something that I know much about it. Speaking in front of, about 50 other people is indeed intimidating in the beginning, especially when they just ignored you *haha*. Sorry to say, but I feel really bad when someone (during lecture) is just busy with his laptop, mobile device etc and begin twittering, facebook-ing. In order to reach the goal of the course, we need to have a mutual understanding and cooperation. I did my job as a lecturer and they also should understand their responsibility as students. Don't get me wrong, I never entered the class with an empty headed and talking about nonsense things. Before the lecture usually I read every section of the book & slides carefully, try to make an interesting example of it. Even the other DDP senior lecturer , also does the same thing. Having said that I always give my best to prepare the lecture, I also the expect the students to also give their best during the lecture. However, it's not always the case for the students :D But um..they just teenagers anyway and 6 credits for a course is indeed a bit overwhelming.

Ok, enough about the challenges, the bottomline is there is still a lot of room for improvement, both for the students and me.

Last but not least, now I realize why Bu Inggriani Liem was so strict when she taught us programming. Bu Inge, wherever you are, my BIG thanks to you. God bless you.

Last day at ASML (Old Draft, Released!)

Last Friday was my last day at ASML as I'm going to leave Netherlands soon. To describe my feelings, it was kind of mixed. I'm happy as I'm going to be closer to my sister and my mother, however there was sad feeling as I will leave the people that I worked with in the last 1 year. The last day was just as the same as another day except thatI have to complete all the leaving checklist and get the signature & stamp from several people. I got a very precious gift from my team, a thing that I actually wanted to buy before I left NL, Netherland's football team jersey!

Next Path (Old Draft Finally Released :D )

/* This was written last year (2010) when confusion came around my head */

I never expected to have a difficult moment to choose the next path in my life. It was stressful, confusing and absorbed so much energy. The trade offs among the options that I had were extreme and mutually exclusive. But I am glad that I've passed that moment that I chose a path. I'm confident and ready to endure for everything that I will undergo. The choice that I picked, I should say, was not popular. I think if 10 people were asked about this, perhaps only 2 people will choose the same path as I am. It's like me against the world.

I may lose something but I will get something else. I keep saying to myself, I need to take few steps back to make a longer jump.

Patch goes beta

I've just got a news from the field that my beta patch already installed in GlobalFoundries, Dresden. So far they're quite delighted about the performance as the existing errors are gone now. Hope that everything will go allright (fingers crossed). Well, that's the only satisfaction that I can get as a software engineer, to have your software used by the big clients and it works fine.

Surrender

Sometimes our dream doesn't get along with the reality. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the sake of others. Sometimes we have to endure from something that we don't like. Sometimes we have to make a hard decision within an obscure circumstances. Sometimes we pray and we just don't get enlightment. Sometimes we walk in the middle of the dark tunnel and cannot see the end of it. Sometimes the universe forced us to stay although we want to leave. Sometimes we just give in. Sometimes we just give in. Sometimes we just give in. Sometimes we surrender.

Let It Go

Apprentice: "Jedi, I cannot start my appp properly. It always shows strange error messages. I don't have a clue what's going on. "
Jedi 1: "Hmm, let me see". (Jedi 1 only restarts the app and stare at the error messages..silence..)

.....

Jedi 1: "Apprentice, even I don't know what's happening."
The Guru: "What's going on guys?"
Jedi 1: "Blablablabla.."
The Guru read the error messages and in one second he shout "Semaphore!"
The Guru : "Jedi 1, you controlled the shared memory. That's why apprentice's app cannot be loaded"
Jedi 1: "???????"
Jedi 2: "Let it go Jedi 1...Let it go..."

Well, four hours without doing nothing is quite annoying. Apparently, Solaris hasn't deallocated the shared memory area. Don't know why.

Sticking to it

I am thinking to find something interesting to do in the future. One of them is doing contributions for the opensource project. To be honest, the experience of GSOC'08 was very memorable as I learned many useful things from the organization and the most important thing was, I got paid to do something that I really really love. As it's not possible to do something that I "really" love from 9 AM to 5 PM, perhaps to explore the interesting projects in open source world (outside the office hours) is the best solution for now. I keep talking to myself that I can make "something" from "something" that I love and I'm still sticking to it.

Another thing that I've done in the last several days was browsing through the SIGIR, WSDM, CIKM conferences and looking for interesting research papers. It's always fun to see how the researchers, computer scientists make something that doesn't exist to be exist, something that seems impossible to be possible. Implicit message: a dream to pursue PhD. It's not a dream actually, but it's a bit more like a plan that cannot be executed now because of my circumstances. But, I'm still sticking to it. Who knows, in the next 2 years it's possible for me to continue PhD.

Hi, I'm Samuel Louvan, and I'm still sticking to my hopes. How about you?

As usual, the after office hour moment has always been the blissful moment for me everyday.However, in the same time, it is also a time when I try to contemplate about things concerning my life such as how's my feeling today, what I've been doing in the office, what am I going to do for the rest of the night etc. Despite of many things that usually pop out in my mind, most of the time I only think about my mood, my bad mood.

Yesterday was the same routine, took the 149/150/174 bus to the station, tried to sleep along the way, but didn't manage. Arrived at the station,I was hungry, went to KFC to have unhealthy moment with those spicy chickens. Right after that, I decided to go to TU/e's library. As usual, I only browsed the Internet there. It's been like a ritual, go to the Internet, try to find something that can direct my life. I was not happy, I wanted to find something that I really like, something that I really passionate about. What kind of subjects do I like? I like IR Technology, machine learning, data mining related areas. I think if I could work in this kind of subject I would be very happy. But sorry to say, not many companies are in this business, but there is one, and it's really big. Google. When I tried to search something related to Google in youtube, I found one video that showed the graduation speech delivered by Marissa Mayer,a woman who is one of the Google's Vice President. In her speech, she shared her experience during her early years in college until she joined Google. To make long story-short, the main point of her advice is that you have to do something that you really love. In the beginning of her education at Stanford, she majored in medical education, she believed that she would be a doctor in several years. But one day she attended an intro ductory course in Computer Science and right from that moment she knew that it's the right path for her. After she graduated, she rejected offers from other companies and decided to join a company called "Google". Her parents were like,"What? Google?" But who knows that Google would be a giant internet company like today.

Not only Marissa, other people such as Steve Jobs the founder of Apple Inc. also had similar experience that he kept looking to everything that may interest him. He did not settle down until he found it. Stay hungry, stay foolish. Looking at these people's experiences, despite of their extraordinary skills I think that they are very lucky to have such life. As for me, it's only a dream except if I dare enough to do something that I really love. In reality, most of the people are willing to do something they don't really like as long as they can survive.

The Best Healer in The World

Grew up together with her, I never expected that she would be a person to whom I relied to. I must admit that she thinks faster, smarter than I am. It's like she resembles my father. A person who was the best healer in my ups and downs in life. Like Laura's status said "My sister is the best healer in the world", it happens for me as well.

Critical Section

I was in the middle of tough conversation, probably the toughest one in my life. I had to make a decision from a binary type question. It was not easy since I felt that I cannot take one of them in mutual exlusive manner. But I cannot do a "busy-waiting" all the time. A process should go on. I made a decision. A painful decision. However, life must go on.

Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better [Ecclesiastes 7:3].