Pondering: Is the concept of nationality losing its relevance?

What if we used culture instead to place a person? I can have a Singaporean culture, but I also draw upon Chinese culture, American (the popular media that I'm exposed to is still pre-dominantly American), a little bit of Japanese (learnt a little Japanese but forgot most of it).. It seems to me that the debate about nationality is sometimes too narrowly focused on patriotic and nationalistic notions, which does not really reflect what a person is.

The current reality is that through the Internet and the ease of transportation, talented people are highly mobile and in touch with what is happening around the world. People under the age of 30 may have studied, worked and lived for extended periods in easily 3 different countries. Forcing them to take up citizenship might instead have the opposite effect of driving them away.

CS3216 - Why it's special

How long does it take Prof Ben to change a lightbulb?

It depends.

(He might be in the middle of a fascinating discussion about the optimal way to teach someone how to change the lightbulb and his mindset using some online video tutorials, facebook posts, buzz updates, blogging... )

To ask for forgiveness =)

Firstly, thank you to all the people I've worked with (hope we stay in touch... ). I am still not good at doing any worthwhile programming, but working with you has been a pleasure.

Facebook App

"Who is the Monkey?" is a game where we mask our friend's profile photo with an icon of a monkey, then we ask our other friends to guess who they are. If this does not give you an idea of our sense of humour...

Team

Seb and Jon, thanks for being damn fun team mates over the first FB assignment.. I think we settled on the most wackiest idea, but it was quite a fun game.. Now, if Seb can make some time after the exams.. =)

Good luck to Jon for his CMU application! =) I'm not so sure what you learnt from the 2 of us.. but if it's anything good, please remember it.

Seb is very hardcore .NET and Microsoft, to the point that he's running Windows 7 on his Macbook. I'm honestly baffled.

Duh..

I learnt that major online platforms have APIs that allow you to build applications for their users (a chorus of duhs from the readers..). It's actually not so duh as you think. Most people (99.9999% of the world population who use FB) don't know that (surprise surprise..). This is what happened to me - I went to an event for startups and I actually showed one of the people there where to find the resources to build their own FB app. The other question that he asked me was where to find this awesome class and whether he could sit in for the lectures.

The world that uses Facebook does not know how to develop applications for Facebook. The potential of FB apps has not even been exploited beyond 0.01%.

This was also my first introduction to cloud computing. I'm quite excited that Amazon is developing one of its cloud computing data centres in Singapore.

Assignment design

I must compliment the assignment. It is easily one of the best written assignments that do 2 things: guide and stretch. I wish there is some place where we can vote for the best prepared teaching material in NUS.

FB Seminar presentation

Thanks Zezhou for thrashing out the presentation points. Hope people like the 7 sins model as a guide.

I think this short assignment was pretty good. A lot of good points were raised by the class presentations about what makes good viral FB apps.

Google wave - Waveplan

The Wave team - Kah Hong (best dressed award in class), josh (video pro.. and a great mate), Justin (pro. nuff said), Dillip (thanks for handling the report)..

This was quite funny, I don't think I will ever experience debugging over MSN, buzz and Gchat ever again.

Honestly, I think I was more of a hindrance to this team, as Kah Hong and Josh did most of the actual work which was coding. josh was also sick during the last part of the assignment! Kah Hong had to covert from his favourite job of designing to coding.. haha.

This assignment was pretty interesting, as Google Wave's documentation was not as polished as Facebook. I hope some of the class will volunteer to work on open-source projects, and if they do, this was a pretty good introduction. I believe that contributing to open-source projects will train you to be a better programmer and being part of a community.

Honestly, I think if we had more time to play with it, we could have done something much more polished. I'm not sure how many of us will go back to tinker around with it after the exams.. Hmm..

Of course, being mentioned on Google's blog is great. Score one for NUS =)

Final Project: Voucherous

Reuben: Like your drive and intensity.

Hong Pang: Quiet execution and very humble.

Andy: Our marketing guy

A simple idea, based on Groupons, and modified to suit Singapore. Execution? Not so easy...

It's funny how things just managed to cock up.

Find a designer?

Not simple. Till today, I'm not sure whether we had to drop the first designer because we did not communicate the style we wanted properly or whether we had unrealistic expectations. Finding a designer took almost 2 weeks out of the 6 weeks..

Hustling for Business

I like Reuben's style of walking randomly into a shopping centre and talking to all the shop owners. That's balls man.

Project management

Till today, I admire Hong Pang's refusal to budge from adding more features to meet the deadlines.

Communications

I won't say that we worked perfectly together, but I think we managed to communicate better with each other at the end. I still think that splitting the team into the technical and business from the start was right, but we did not handle the communications well. I guess this comes with experience, as all of us were unused to each other's working style.

Wave does not work - We are still not used to changing our behaviour for wave, despite it being more functional than Docs or email.

Google docs - Much better

Gmail - Less efficient with email threads getting crowded, but not bad at team updates.

Our life is on Google. =)

PayPal integration

PayPal integration was not as simple as we thought. On the other hand, if you guys ever need to talk to someone who has wrestled with it, please talk to Hong Pang. I guess integrating PayPal will get more important, as the recent deal between DBS (DBS has over 90% over the local population) and PayPal effectively means the local online transactions market is cornered by PayPal (oops, e-NETs?).

Summary: Perfect example of how much we underestimate execution, while the idea is just a start.

Other CS3216 friends

I have made many new friends in this course.. I'll just mention a few that I've had the pleasure of talking to.

Wye Mun - Bioeng Major (why?), and web designer (http://www.wyemun.com/) If you need a good freelance designer.. You know who to call/recommend. Flash, CSS, Javascript..

Jian Hong - Bball someday after exams =) Foodwerkz, food, enhanced image processing (inside joke)

Cedric - Cheem sia.. But good thoughts. If you could be a little more succinct, you might be able to communicate the message within people's attention span =)

Tomithy - Thanks for introducing me to genetic algorithms, bio-computing and your interest in social causes. Have fun in NOC! =) (Many of us in the class did.. maybe a bit more than we were supposed to)

Other interesting people

Ji Wei and Jonathan Low - Man, this guy from physics and Jon Low are a damn funny pair. And TopsyTurvia is quite fun to play.. =)

Bernard - Good luck for the choices you make in life.

Laurence - Hope you make it in business.. =) You seem to like it. However, bear in mind that you have friends who like you regardless of how much money or attitude you have. If NES IT director gets too boring for you, maybe you should start 2 companies..

Wai Hong - Thanks for your encouragement on my blog =) Quite surprised thanks.

Xialin - Thanks for taking our group photo! Your FB profile pic is quite cool, reminds me of a ninja =)

Hung Doan - Honestly, I don't think I've ever seen this guy not smiling and bouncing around.

TAs and Speakers

Congrats for surviving as his TAs =)

Chris Henry - I really like the presentation you did. Thanks a lot, I saved that as a reference.

Yan Jie - All the best for your journey as a teacher! Your students are going to be so lucky to have well-thought out slides and lessons.

Su Yuen - Err. Crazy. Haha. (Great designer)

Jason - Thanks for your introductory programming lectures.

Kok Wee - Thanks dude! I know you handled a lot of the irritating administrative stuff. Good luck for your tuition agency!

The speakers were great! Actually, I think the speakers alone would have made the class worthwhile.. Certainly learnt a lot from them.

Overall

Mood diary - Wow. Pro sia. Their take-up rate is pretty awesome. 16,000+ users in a few weeks?!

BrainStormer - Getting some good reviews and the UI is nice. Jia you!=)

Blogging is good for people who like to write.. Maybe it's a good way to force people to recap what they've learnt. I noticed that there are people who don't really like writing..

A lot of the people in class have the chance to apply for NOC. I hope you do.

Questions I still don't have answers for:

Why must such a class need soooooo much manpower, effort and thinking? Is there any way to create the same value/quality but some way to reduce the hassle?

This is certainly not "think more, do less". This is "think a damn bloody lot, do a damn hell more".

On the other hand, if every class I've taken was like this..

Is it true that the year 1s and 2s have been affected to a greater degree? I think the technical stuff was not that important. I could feel that the year 1s and 2s were impacted more by the class. (Stay teachable.)

I'm surprised that Justin and Yanjie came to talk to me about the healthcare idea. Thanks..

Did I suck? Haha.

Can everyone be a teacher? To be a teacher is really a calling.

I have more questions than answers. Maybe I wasn't looking for answers in the first place..

P.S. The second last photo is "Guide by Ben Leong - Common Sense - How to survive NUS SoC"

How long does it take a teacher to make an impact?

It depends. But they never stop trying.