I need everyone to weigh in. I am considering taking my probability / statistics class this Summer and I’ve narrowed it down to MATH 3215 or ISYE 3770. I’ve looked at each syllabus and I’m leaning towards ISYE 3770, but it’s hard to tell what each is all about. The downside to MATH 3215 is the instructor teaching it in the Summer has a LOW GPA. I am going to see an advisor and ask them as well, but I thought I could use some input from experienced students who have taken either.

So please, anyone with an opinion on this, comment.

It’s inevitable. Spring break is right around the corner and I have more work due in 1 week then I have had all semester. Here’s the run down:

• Monday
  • Study / Work on everything coming up
• Tuesday
  • CS 4001 Midterm
  • CS 3240 Homework due
• Wednesday
  • CS 4400 Quiz
  • CS 1332 Quiz
• Thursday
  • CS 4001 Term paper outline due
• Friday
  • CS 4400 Project phase 2 due
  • CS 1332 Homework due

Professors love to cram everything in at the last moment. Looks like I will be stuck in front of a computer all weekend. Spring break around the corner has now become a double edge sword. I know I’m not the only one in this position. I’m sure every Tech student taking more than 6 hours is. So, good luck everyone!

Yahoo!
Rasmus Lerdorf has been giving talks all over campus during Yahoo! Hack Week. Luckily he was able to pay my CS1332 class a visit as well. Who is Rasmus Lerdorf? He is the father of PHP. He basically built it completely from the ground up for the first two releases and has since been working at Yahoo!. I was really excited to hear him speak mainly because my first language was PHP and I’ve been developing web applications in PHP around 5 years. He began the talk with a breakdown of how Yahoo! is able to use many servers to accomplish one task. His example was Yahoo! mail. The mail application is comprised of has many servers and each of these servers is responsible for some small aspect of the application. There is a cluster of servers that handle the deletion of mail, a cluster that handles sending, moving, etc. It was really interesting to hear how large scale web applications are able to handle the billions of hits they receive a day.

PHP vs. RoR
Rasmus also spoke about PHP and how it is able to easily parse XML files and integrate AJAX components into web pages. But, when he was taking questions, I asked if he had worked with any PHP frameworks. I asked because I noticed the job market for web developers seemed to be calling for more framework programmers (ie. Ruby on Rails, CakePHP, JSF). Also, I have used most of these frameworks and noticed that everything they accomplish I can do in PHP. So where’s the advantage if one exists?

Well, frameworks make it easier to develop applications that are redundant. If I need a CRUD application that allows me to post things on my blog, rails accomplishes this in minutes, whereas in PHP it would take some time (for me anyways). So he basically said he hates general purpose frameworks. I’m being harsher than his actual words were, but I did get a sense that he really didn’t like them. He said Yahoo! uses frameworks for their mail apps, their searches, and many other applications that they server on the web. But, of course, these are not general purpose frameworks, they are custom designed to suit Yahoo’s needs. He said frameworks like RoR are good for smaller sites, but it would be very difficult to allow the application to spread its work to multiple servers for parallel processing because of the MVC structure they take on.

In conclusion, the talk was very insightful, he did speak about some of the history of PHP, which was really interesting, and also his own background. Thank you Rasmus!

So now I’m stuck on some issues. Should I move forward with framework programming: RoR, CakePHP, JSF, or should I develop well rounded PHP / MySQL / Javascript skills to really take control of dynamic AJAX web application programming? The website I’m building is in Rails because the job market for Rails is HUGE! But, will this die down? Maybe I should just focus on becoming a systems programmer?