Week 5 : Education

 I would like to talk education, I was originally trained as an artist and for the next twelve years I taught myself programming. I was lucky to be apprenticed by Paul Dana, President/Owner/Programming Guru of Plastic Games. Paul has been programming for 30 years, he was passionate about computer graphics before they were common vernacular. Paul taught me a lot about software engineering and debugging, particularly debugging. We work well together, how else could we release outstanding attractions for the Disney Theme parks.

As I became more engrossed in programming it became clear to me that I was missing some engineering concepts, particularly Calculus and Physics. One of my personal goals when returning to school for my masters was to fill in the gaps in my education. Over the years I had collected the Game Programming Gems and AI Game Programming Wisdom Series. Although I attempted to read them I but could never understand them.Once I returned to school I revisited my library and began reading them along with my studies. I was shocked to find that all the software principals Paul had taught me were being preached in these books. Sure there were concepts I was not quite aware of but I 'put a pin' in them and kept reading. As  Calc 3 concluded it became clear that those topics that I had 'pinned' were part of the fundamentals of Calculus. While many students were learning something for a test I was learning something that could be applied directly to my work, it was inspiring.

Graduate school has provided me a wealth of topics to use in future work. In this post lets look at data and databases,  most undergraduates should know about databases upon graduation, but many are unaware of how the database engine works, or how it recovers when it breaks. Sure undergrads know about SQL and ACID databases, but what of BASE databases? Cloud computing is just a fancy term for providing ways to store and operate on data remotely. Do you store it in a datastore (BASE), a cloud SQL service (ACID) what are the cost associated with each? Games are recording a wealth of data for each product. What does that data really mean? Perhaps using semantic technology can help. Certainly you need to extract nuggets of knowledge through clustering, apiori or correlation. While most undergraduates are learning one of these topics as a graduate student we are expected to know them all.

We will pick up this discussion in later posts.

Finally, I was able to get another TellTaler to LinkIn with me, thank you!

See you in Thirty Six Weeks!