My Project

I've been working too hard the past couple of weeks. I'm stressed – I don't think I have ever been stressed in February. The work is interesting and sometimes fun, but its simply too much. But, heading into week three, it seems as if I'm still keeping everything reasonably together. Things are just going to keep getting more hectic for a while longer, but I just have to get into the groove of things. In the meantime, though, idle relaxation and social activity are going to be heavily impacted. But that is simply the price you have to pay for living the glamorous life of a computer scientist!

An important part of doing your honours is your year project. The exact shape and extent of this project varies from department to department, but at the Computer Science department at Stellenbosch, its a rather big project involving programming, theoretical research and a gruelling presentation of all the fruits of your labour at the end. The also prefer something “new” or reasonably “wow”, even at honours level, so I think the bar is set fairly high. I've been thinking of the project since even before the holidays started, but it was only today that a choice was made. It came down the a good friend of mine and me being interested in the exact same two topics. It was difficult to choose (for several reasons) and we stopped right before actually flipping a coin (I was already generating random number ons my laptop), but in the end we managed to each select just one. I wish him all the luck with his project and that he will not only be successful, but also enjoy the process thoroughly.

I ended up choosing a project that involves implementing Thompson's algorithm for matching regular expressions (which is much faster than the conventionally used algorithms). The project scope, however, has to be larger than that, but it is still unclear what lies beyond it. That is the con of this choice: the project hasn't been fully defined yet. It also involves much more theoretical research than the alternate choice, but I'm just going to have to buckle up. This may not be an overly “wow” project, but I think that it can be fun. But that all lies in the future still: I don't know how soon I'll actually be able to start working on it.