It is finally over. My adviser has signed my thesis. I’ve learned a lot in the past two years in the Program Analysis Group, about program analysis, testing, the JVM, academic writing, frustration, and elation. I have a much stronger understanding of the concepts behind my project, and ideas for better alternatives. [...]
After two weeks of nonstop writing, I have a mostly-complete MEng Thesis Rough Draft! (”Mostly” refers to the fact that the experimental sections are really “proposed experiments” and not “experimental results” right now; that’s what the next month is for…)
It’s been a while since I’ve updated about my thesis project, amock. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on it. In fact, it’s in pretty solid shape, and I’ve been focusing on writing the thesis itself (goal: full rough draft by Friday).
I presented about amock at group meeting today; here are [...]
I’ve found that 99% of the time, when somebody asks a detailed technical question, the right first answer is “What are you really trying to do?” It’s often frustrating for the person who hears it; they think they understand their problem very well and that they’ve reduced it to a single technical point, but [...]
Thursday, January 25, 2007
It’s horribly hacky. The newest file is full of TODO comments and special cases. (The rest of the infrastructure is slightly less so.)
But!
amock can run a system test and automatically generate a passing unit test from it!
(The key word here is a system test: the one it is tested on. But still!)
In the interests of openness, and for that matter making me embarrassed if I’m not making steady progress, I’ve moved the Subversion repository for my thesis project amock to Google Code Hosting.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
I wrote three papers at the end of last semester. The first was the proposal for my master’s thesis. My project is inspired by David Saff’s test factoring project. It can be relatively easy to write a few top-level system tests for an application, whereas it can be slow and tedious to [...]
While my main work recently has been doing research towards my MEng in the Program Analysis Group at MIT’s CSAIL, I’ve been paying attention to the “secret project” from my internship at Best Practical last summer. Most of what I did there was way out in the open, in the public repositories of the [...]
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
I’ve had a personal blog for a while, but it never felt like a good place to post tech-related stuff. So, now this.
My name is David Glasser. I am a student at MIT. In June I will finish my bachelor’s degrees in computer science and mathematics and become a Masters of Engineering student in [...]