Perception

So the results were released at the start of the week, and for this semester there wasn’t really any suspense or apprehension preceding it. Having done pretty amazingly for one semester and immediately following up with a flop of results the next, I didn’t know what to expect this time round, although I did have [...]

Tags: CAP, CS2103, CS3216, CS3240, MA1101R, NM3215, Results

[Note: This entry was written for the module, CS3216]
The ad-hoc lecture on ‘Grades, Scholarships and Meritocracy” was an interesting hour of discussion on the Singapore education system as well as the Civil Service. In a certain segment of the presentation, a pyramid concept was described to explain how the meritocratic system of the government is [...]

Tags: Civil Service, CS3216, Malcolm Gladwell, Matthew Effect, Outliers, Robert K. Merton

[Note: This entry was written for the module, CS3216]
The video conferencing session with Google Wave’s Pamela Fox truly underlined the excitement of taking this module. To have a core member of the Wave team review our applications and personally share with us the new attractive APIs sweetened the deal of being in this awesome class.
It [...]

Tags: Active Bots API, AJAX, Ben Leong, CS3216, Google Wave, Human-Computer Interaction, Pamela Fox

[Note: This entry was written for the module, CS3216]
The title of this entry pretty much sums up the main point illustrated by Chewy Chong in his talk titled ‘You, Others and the Business of People”, which was a really engaging and entertaining session to sit through. What I particularly enjoyed was how the seemingly obvious [...]

Tags: Chewy Chong, CS3216

[Note: This entry was written for the module, CS3216]
This is the follow-up post on the pitching session, and after spending more time thinking about what I’ve heard, I don’t think there are any explicit lessons that I learnt from the speakers (bar the 6Waves seminar). Instead, what I felt was the most important theme to [...]

Tags: 6Waves, CS3216, Explosive Barrel, Facebook, iSyndica, Microsoft, Ministry of National Development, Module-Review, RedSports

[Note: This entry was written for the module, CS3216]
The pitching session last Monday evening, in my mind, was prized to be one of the highlights of the module. Sans the informative seminars by the technological giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, the pitching session was alluring in the sense that it was an opportunity to [...]

Tags: 6Waves, Amazon, Ben Leong, CS3216, Explosive Barrel, Google, Leslie Tan, Microsoft, Ministry of National Development, Module-Review, Project Nimbus, RedSports, sgBEAT

[Note: This entry was written for the module, CS3216]
Teamwork is a concept that is continuously expounded, and in the Second Lecture it was touched on briefly as an elementary yet critical foundation in software engineering. Like most concepts, the idea of forging interpersonal cooperation is easily digested in theory, but in practice, every team is [...]

Tags: CS3216, Facebook

[Note: This entry was written for the module, CS3216]
A question posed to Professor Ben in the First Lecture was “What is success?”. If it was meant to falter him, it was an amusing and cheeky endeavour. Else, it was a question that was much too vague and without context.
Professor Ben answers the question with an [...]

Tags: Ben Leong, CS3216

The first week of the term is over, and it’s been the busiest first week I’ve ever had in my four semesters in school. Most of my time has been taken up by a single module, CS3216 (and quite expectedly so), and that’s mostly because it’s easily the only module I’ve been passionate about. I [...]

Tags: CS3216, Facebook, NOC

[Note: This entry was written for the module, CS3216]
One of the most common mistakes in any endeavour is doing more than necessary. This doesn’t sound particularly bad on the surface, but at times, overdoing something can have detrimental effects that hamper the objectives of the initial endeavour.
Two subsets of the above behaviour are redundancy and [...]

Tags: Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Ben Leong, CS3216, Evan Williams, Sand & Stars, Twitter, Wind