Volodymyr Obrizan: personal website - 05

Why I Quit the University

2016-11-05T10:05:00+02:00

Six months ago I wrote a post called "I’m Quitting the University" (I’m Quitting the University) and promised to explain why I left.

Students would often come up to me and ask: "Vladimir Igorevich, why are you still working here instead of going to the U.S."? Blushing, I would answer: "And who’s going to teach you, then?" or "I’m occupying my social role" or the downright philosophical: "If I had left, we wouldn’t have met".

From 2005 to 2016, I had four roles at the university:

— teacher;
— researcher;
— manager;
— clerk.

In the role of clerk, I was a member of the university’s Council of Young Scientists. It was an All Stars council, because it had the most active and smartest young people from our university. One of the brightest moments of our work on the Council was submitting a proposal on how to change the Youth Forum so that it would become attractive to young scientists from outside, and simply to set the bar higher, not be the disgrace it is now. But the university administration did not support us. After some time it became clear that we were a "pocket council".

As a manager, I supervised student projects at the APVT department. I also met a bunch of talented people; years later, we’re still in touch with many of them. Working with students is interesting, but not easy. Very often it happened that students simply disappeared the moment the semester ended and the term paper had been submitted.

— But what about turning the term paper into a cool startup, implementing it, selling it?
— Well, some other time.

As a researcher, I wrote papers and a dissertation. Science is one of the most exciting kinds of work, because you are constantly learning, and there’s no end in sight. You can’t research something completely. But it takes a lot of time. Especially since our field is technical — it takes ten times more time than theoretical sciences. Because of the shortage in my time budget, my scientific result turned out proportionally modest.

As a teacher, I was the first at our university (and in Ukraine, too) to develop and teach courses on parallel programming on multicore processors, designing systems-on-chip using the SystemC language, mobile platform programming, and cloud service programming. Not all students appreciated my work as much as it deserved. I remember that day very well. It was Friday, April 22, 2016. I had prepared for the last lecture in the mobile platform programming course. It was supposed to be a cool lecture about mobile analytics. But out of two groups, only one person came to class. A week later I held the last lab, mechanically entered the students’ grades. After the lab I stopped by the department head’s office and said that I was leaving.

A question arises. If not money, then what motivated me to work at the university? In business school we were taught that, as it turns out, salary is not a motivating factor. In the modern theory of motivation (Herzberg), motivating factors are success, career growth, recognition and approval of work results, creative growth, and a high degree of responsibility.

No success at the university — no motivation to work there.

Now the time I used to spend at the university on lectures, I spend on lectures in my own organization. This has a very big effect, and with it success. There is success — there is motivation to give them.

At the university I was the town lunatic, and outside it — an expert in software product development.

To be fair, I want to note several major successes. First, participating in the project to develop the Sigetest fault simulation system — above all, a great deal of work by Sergey Zaichenko. Second, participating in the work of the organizing committee of the East-West Design & Test Symposium — the great and persistent work of Prof. Khakhanov, Chumachenko, Litvinova, and all the volunteers. And the cherry on top — running the "Python at APVT" club. Everyone there is great; it’s hard to single anyone out. :)

A Reply 11 Years Later

2016-02-05T22:53:00+02:00

In 1999 I met a girl at the seaside. We struck up a friendship, but it didn’t last long, literally a couple of days: her family was leaving the resort much earlier than mine. She lived in another city, and since neither the internet nor texting had been invented yet (I mean they hadn’t been invented in Ukraine), the only way to communicate was paper mail.

By the way, I have a very good relationship with regular mail; back then it wasn’t hard for me at all to write her letters once a week, or to other friends. I even taught one friend to play guitar by paper mail. And I still send postcards from every city I visit.

And we started writing to each other. A few months later we had a misunderstanding, and I stopped answering her letters. That was the end of the epistolary romance.

Fast-forward to 2010. Mobile phones, some people had two, the internet, HDTV, the hryvnia at eight to the dollar, Yanukovych had just become president. I had acquired social networks and was looking for classmates, university groupmates, and other acquaintances. I also remembered that old correspondence. Finding the girl by first and last name wasn’t difficult. I sat up all night and reread all the letters from that distant ’99. And I wrote her a reply to those unanswered letters 11 years later.

Of course, no friendship came of it anymore. A person at 15 and a person at 26 are two different people. But the deed was done: the correspondence got its logical ending.

But it’s better to answer on time.

A Podcast with a Programmer from Uber

2015-11-05T08:26:00+02:00

An interesting podcast with Andrey Yasinetsky — a programmer from Uber (in Russian). Very interesting stuff about the present and future of the service.

In San Francisco, Uber is optimized so that a car arrives on average 2.5 minutes after you order it. In our 16-story building, you have to wait longer for the elevator. That is, you call a taxi, and by the time you’ve left the apartment and come down, the car is already waiting outside the building.

Interesting that in the future everything will be optimized so that several passengers who don’t know each other will ride in the same car, simply because they’re going the same way. And there will also be a few packages in the trunk. That saves more.

Students Are Curious 2

2014-10-05T21:52:00+03:00

Students are curious:

I want to get serious about programming. Which language should I choose?

If you’re going to get serious, then any of them.

A common mistake among students is to sit around and do nothing. We won’t discuss laziness here; instead, let’s look at the situation where a student is paralyzed by the choice of a language or technology.

From outside the profession, some people think there are languages (technologies, libraries, frameworks) whose study is guaranteed to lead to success, and others whose study will be nothing but a waste of time. And if that’s the case, the student has trouble choosing: what if I make the wrong choice and it’s all for nothing? But the secret here is very simple: studying any language leads to success.

While some students waste time in unproductive, superficial musings about the advantages and disadvantages of one technology or another, other students read books, write programs, make mistakes the hard way, rewrite programs from scratch, and already know firsthand things the first group doesn’t even suspect.

It’s also important to understand that choosing a language is, in most cases, just choosing the syntax for entering instructions into a computer. The fundamental principles of building systems, the principles of object-oriented or functional programming, algorithms, protocols, and standards are the same everywhere. From an OOP point of view, a class interface in Python will be the same as in C#. The format of a JSON response from a server for Android is no different from a JSON response from a server for iPhone. And so on.

Choosing the first language to study seriously is not a choice for life. Most likely, the student will learn several more programming languages before defending the thesis, and then several more after becoming a professional. And so on for the rest of their life.

And so, while some guys are learning and developing, other guys are wasting time on doubts.

Go and program!

In previous installments:

— Students Are Curious about defending a thesis.

Interested in my opinion on any question of university life? Send your questions to volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com. Anonymity is guaranteed. Answers will be published as questions come in. Questions can also be asked through the anonymous-questions site http://ask.fm/obrizan

The KhNURE Website in 20x2

2012-08-05T15:08:00+03:00

And Now, the Weather

2010-12-05T10:51:00+02:00

I can’t understand how people even live in this world when they’re hot in the summer, cold in the winter, damp in the fall, and in spring it’s who the hell knows what. My favorite time of year is the one that’s here and now. In summer — summer, in fall — fall, in winter — winter.

From a recent conversation: — How’s it going? — Well, it’s cold... — Cold? Buddy, it’s only minus 10 and you’re already cold? What are you going to say at minus 25?

I remember in 2006, in winter, I studied for two weeks at Nizhny Novgorod State University. Back then, in late January, the thermometer rarely climbed above minus 20. But for us it was pure happiness to go for a walk as a whole group around the center of Nizhny Novgorod late in the evening, almost at minus 30. I remember those walks with great joy, and I’d gladly do them again.

One acquaintance of mine, as soon as winter starts, buys up sleeping pills at the pharmacy, locks himself in the house, and sleeps the whole time until the first little streams appear outside. When I look at the thermometer and it says minus 25, I think: “Oh, I should go for a walk; it’s not often that winter is this damn nice”!

There’s no such thing as bad weather.

Marketing Merchandising II

2010-11-05T22:22:00+02:00

We recently already wrote about how the local Rohan drunks are being screwed over on a high intellectual level. To recap, back then a social-beer pack of Lvivske, consisting of six bottles, cost 17.95. Under the slogan “convenient and economical,” the item is being sold for one kopeck more. But today the marketing merchandising department of the Klass supermarket has gone way too far. Taking advantage of the fact that a person in a state of alcoholic intoxication is incapable of multiplying three-digit decimal numbers by six in their head, they jacked the price of the “economical” rot-pack up to 18 hryvnias 25 kopecks, which is 31 kopecks more than buying the same piss in bottles separately.

The “Multicore Programming” Course Has Ended

2009-05-05T22:22:00+03:00

Today was the last lecture in “Multicore Programming,” a course I teach for the students in our club. I’d like to thank the guys who, despite the fact that the course isn’t meant for first-year students, and despite the late hour of the classes, still kept coming right up to the end. Many teachers could envy me for the students’ having such strong internal motivation.

Over these 22 lectures and practical sessions we managed to cover quite a lot: we programmed with the OpenMP, WinAPI, MPI, and Intel Threading Building Blocks libraries, tried out Intel VTune Performance Analyzer, Thread Checker, and Thread Profiler, and even had enough time to get sidetracked and try optimizing sequential programs for the specifics of the Intel Core2 Duo microarchitecture.

I’d like to get feedback from you: what did you like about the course, and what didn’t you like? What can be improved, and what can be made worse? In particular, I have these questions:

should we study WinAPI, or should we start with OpenMP and focus more on Intel TBB?
should more attention be paid to how the microarchitecture is structured?
what was hardest to understand, and during which topics were you “yawning”?
what can be covered in more detail, and what can be thrown out?
what examples should be covered in the labs?
what should be done to make the course more interesting, more fun, and more useful?

You can answer in the comments, write to volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com, or talk to me in person. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Those who want to attend this course should wait until the fall. Most likely, I’ll teach it once more as part of our club sessions.