Selling...

For my last post of the evening, I'm going to ramble a bit and let you, poor reader, in on one of the issues I've been struggling with lately.

One of the key criticisms that came out of my advancement was the fact that my committee was frustrated with my inability to convey to them anything interesting at a level which they could understand. Afterwards, my advisor's comment was that, like Roy, I like details and have an unquestioned mastery of those details. (That's why the committee passed me, I guess.) But, it seems that they felt there was something interesting to be said - the committee just felt that they weren't sure what it was. That's why I'm glad to get away for a little bit to let the import of these comments fully sink in.

This has brought home one of my major weaknesses: I don't do a very good job of helping other people understand what it is I'm talking about in an easily grokkable manner. In other words, if you're already familiar with the underlying concepts that I'm talking about - what I'm saying will make lots of sense (I hope!) - yet that often requires a huge cognitive jump to understand the impact of what it is I'm doing - and most importantly, why what I'm doing is so interesting.

It was epitomized again tonight at dinner with Rohit. I was trying to explain my dissertation area - and as usual, I'm not a very buzz-wordy guy. So, unsurprisingly, my concept was getting lost. Now, what was so compelling to see was Rohit instantly take what I had just said and then restate it in a way that the rest of the people understood exactly what I'm doing and why it's interesting. All I could do was just smile and marvel at the display I just witnessed.

That's why he has a PhD and I don't. This is the key issue I face. My committee (and to a larger degree, my advisor) won't grant me that degree until I can sell ideas at that same level with that same ease. Partly, it's because they believe I can do that.

On the other hand, I'm no longer willing to stick around for an indefinite number of years to jump through those hurdles. I'm not going to enter into a waiting game hoping for a stalemate to get that piece of paper. (It's a perfectly valid way of earning a PhD, but it's not for me.)

A conversation with my mother now usually touches on the following phrases: "Your father took four years; why aren't you done yet?" "Stop getting distracted by other things and finish." Thanks so much Mom for those words of encouragement. (Needless to say, she doesn't like the fact that I am at Google right now on an internship.) My dad, having gone through the process, is a bit kinder. More pragmatically, living on a grad student's stipend is really harsh. You can only do the self-flagellation thing for so long.

Is it worth me changing who I am to get that piece of paper? Will I be better off?

I don't know.

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CommerceNet Tech Talk

I gave a tech talk at CommerceNet yesterday. It touched on a variety of topics: Apache (a summary of our projects, how we're organized, what some of the social structures imply), E-Commerce History (what it means to conserve dynamic websites and why this is important going forward), and my Subversion/Serf work (on building better RESTful applications). I had a number of insightful questions from the attendees.

I also picked up a few interesting tidbits - notably regarding E Programming Language's Promise Pipeline. Without having had a chance to read too much, it seems that it might resolve some of the internal dialogues I've been having about building a chain of requests that depend upon responses from a previous request without stalling the pipeline.

Finally, thanks to Rohit for inviting me!

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A report from the abyss

Things are going well on my hiatus from the tower at Google. My work with ra_serf is proceeding rather well. I'm now using ra_serf for all of my day-to-day work as I continue through the Subversion regression tests (working on binary props at the moment). Everything is in trunk, so others can play along at home if they want to. My status updates are available from February and March. It should be pretty close to wrapped up by the time I leave next month. In sum, this has been a refreshing change of pace after all the work I placed into my advancement.

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