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daI just met with the grad students who had a project for me in December. I've felt like I should've been making faster progress these last two months, especially since it's my first project and I imagined everyone wondering what the hell I was doing. But I didn't have a deadline- it's thesis work and they're not done with data-collection. And technical progress reports weren't really what they were after, so I got to work without interruption for quite a while. So I'm chugging away, learning VB from scratch, and today was the first demo.
I half expected them to say, "that's OK, but when will it be finished?" But no, they are very happy with my rate of progress, and so far, the work I've done is what they need. Before the meeting I'd thought I was about 80% done, time-wise (about 90% feature-wise). I've revised that downward to about 70%/85%, though the next time I see them they may have more features to add. (Which is fine; my job's to make their research easier; and for some of the program mechanics and features, they won't know if it's right until after they've seen it.) But they didn't have any complaints about the rate of progress; nor of the product. Yay.
It's satisfying to demo a project and have everything work correctly. I only demoed what works, and it didn't spontaniously break, and that pleased me.
Instead, I hit a button and we watched excel build 11 sheets, each filled with charts, breaking down the measurements of mice running around in cages, how much food they ate, how much oxygen they used and a few other things.
Yes, they can add more trials. Yes, they can have more or fewer mice, and relabel their data. Bam, here's another 11 sheets of output. They liked this, since each run took Chris a few days to do by hand.
And now, it's time for me to go home for lunch with d., who is apparently awake before noon today (after something like 13 hours of sleep the night before).
I half expected them to say, "that's OK, but when will it be finished?" But no, they are very happy with my rate of progress, and so far, the work I've done is what they need. Before the meeting I'd thought I was about 80% done, time-wise (about 90% feature-wise). I've revised that downward to about 70%/85%, though the next time I see them they may have more features to add. (Which is fine; my job's to make their research easier; and for some of the program mechanics and features, they won't know if it's right until after they've seen it.) But they didn't have any complaints about the rate of progress; nor of the product. Yay.
It's satisfying to demo a project and have everything work correctly. I only demoed what works, and it didn't spontaniously break, and that pleased me.
Instead, I hit a button and we watched excel build 11 sheets, each filled with charts, breaking down the measurements of mice running around in cages, how much food they ate, how much oxygen they used and a few other things.
Yes, they can add more trials. Yes, they can have more or fewer mice, and relabel their data. Bam, here's another 11 sheets of output. They liked this, since each run took Chris a few days to do by hand.
And now, it's time for me to go home for lunch with d., who is apparently awake before noon today (after something like 13 hours of sleep the night before).
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Date: Wednesday, 21 February 2007 05:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, 21 February 2007 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Thursday, 22 February 2007 01:25 am (UTC)I had to learn VB for a data mining class I took (which was through the Wharton School, and not Engineering). It was ok, for what it was, but it's kind of a "kloodgy" (sp?) language. I often felt like my code was held together by scotch tape or something, somehow (though it appeared to function ok)....
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Date: Thursday, 22 February 2007 03:31 am (UTC)'On Error Goto 0' just feels icky.
...Of course, much of Perl felt icky and broken when I was starting with it, but then the quirks became endearing in their own way.
I've yet to see a VB program that I thought was elegantly written.