10 May 2017: Exam Review

so today I don't have much of a plan except answer questions about the exam and when we run out of questions we'll leave because it's nice outside and there's some sort of other talk going on right now all right so yeah today is just open the floor for exam questions just the latest update on people completing the assignments so remember that you have we're going to hold office hours through the remainder of the week but you have you know probably until like next Friday to complete keep working if you want to keep submitting things again we'll keep answering questions on the forum and stuff like that no office hours next week those exams but we do have office hours for the rest of the week so if you're still working on assignment three years on it too you know keep coming in there's still people around to help I think it's going to stop oh you know what there we go okay the course evaluations are now about 72% I suspect everybody in here has done the evaluations that's the problem I had up talking with the people that did them but if you have some friends in the class you might want to email them and say hey you should do the evaluation the exam is on Monday so you just don't have that much time left to get your hands on these questions and I actually really want you to do this because then I don't have to write as many questions so so please finish the heats right yeah so right now there'll be a short answer released as soon as I write it and then when you get to 80% you get the media mats or 95% it's pot it's possible that these might come out on like Sunday night or something so that's but you know a little bit of time is better than not so so please please finish these the evaluate has anyone done the evaluation I'm assuming those people have it's short right yeah it's easy I'm sorry it's so ugly huh oh my god they have like a yeah no it doesn't count the people that draw at the class I know good good good try I like that yeah I know I know I know that too and still I I know exactly how many students are in the class and I can add the two numbers that are on the sheet right and they add up no I just took you guys are this is good you guys are you know you got some regression testing me but no I've done the math there's 118 students left in the class there's 118 students I don't know why they have that button I don't know why a lot of things about the course evaluation system but anyway okay so yeah please I mean people can withdraw late but known as done as far as I know so ok plus install 5% I'm not asking for a hundred that's asking for 95 right ok so I want to give some shoutouts to the staff this semester and I hope you guys will help me with this particularly comment Carl is here you know Carl has obviously been here a lot I you know everybody in the course staff has done great work this semester and I think the performance of students in this class on the assignments is a reflection of that but Carl has you know done something very unusual this semester obviously he's been here he's been lecturing I think he's been pretty good at luxury and how many people agree with that yeah and he calls awesome right so I really want to thank Carl and let's give him a round of applause for I've lost track of how many times he he was a guest lecturer when I asked him the first time I was like oh this will just happen once right and now it's like I don't know it's been like 10 times or something so it's sort of a little bit embarrassing in my part but I mean Karl has been fantastic and I think for him given what he wants to do this was a nice experience as well and he obviously is really good at it so by the way I'm going to suggest to the powers that be that Carl actually teach this class next year I know that they're looking for people to do it maybe they found people already but maybe Carl is better than the people that they found so if he does that then the course will be taught largely in its present form some of you guys may end up being involved with it and stuff like that but I don't know if that's going to happen you know obviously no one cares what I think anymore about anything so all I can do is offer an alternative and see what happens about I mean how many people here think Carl would be a great instructor for the class yeah me too ok great I won't ask you to vote one embarrass anybody um ok the course rest of the the course TAS right so Ali and Carl been doing a great job recitation Vicki's been doing a great job in office hours so let's give them a round of applause also all the grading that they did by the way Carl reminded me to remind you to pick up your midterm papers there's a lot of people that haven't done that yet if you like want to have some sense of a how you did on the midterm and be you know mistakes that you might want to avoid on the fun so we have those available come by office hours and we can pick up your paper for you the ninjas so there was obviously gazillion people did office hours this year you know I probably don't have all of them even up on the slides and the people that finished have been showing up in office hours so I think you know this is a big reason why the class works the way it does I'm sure that you guys have your favorites on this list but I think that you know all these people made a contribution so let's give them a big round okay yeah and none of these people were paid to do this they were also doing out of the goodness of their heart I put together a slide at some point for talk I was giving about how many office hours the volunteers were doing and I was like looking at it and I was like I didn't tell brijesh to do six office hours a week like what is he doing but anyway he wanted to so he did that and I think you guys benefited you know particularly brijesh with attack nights and things like that so this was great okay exam so the exam is next Monday it's in this room unfortunately because it's a tight fit but well you know so essentially the exam we're going to handle it in the same way as the midterm car reminding me to remind you that that requires you having a UV ID so if you don't have a UV ID for some reason you have until Monday to get one so that you can take the exam the format is going to be the same as in previous years so the midterm is typically an exam that people feel like is hard to complete in the time allotted how many people agree with that sit yeah so the the final exam is not it's about twice as long but you have about three times as long to do it so you know prep in the same way there are 10 multiple-choice questions six short answer questions one of which I'll release one or two medium answer questions I haven't decided how many I want to bother writing and then two long answer questions that you have to answer of potentially three the medium answer question on the exam is similar in expectations to the long answer question on the midterm and the medium answer question and most of the multiple choice and short answer questions will focus on material that we covered in the second half of the class so I guarantee that the medium answer question will be on something that we covered since the midterm so virtualization file systems things like that the long answer questions anything is fair game so if you look at previous exams along extra questions you know can cover stuff from the first half of the class they can integrate material that you guys have done throughout the class whatever so so those are designed to be more holistic any questions about the format okay questions about the exam or material that we covered in the class or life skills well I'll give you guys a minute to think about this let me make a few suggestions so now you're done with the class right and there may be some holes in your schedule some people were like oh I'm going to get out my gaming laptop I don't know I don't necessarily support that but but let me talk about some things that you can do next to these here at UB so there are some decent courses that are our follow on says how many people will be here next year taking classes and so forth ok awesome so some courses that you might like so the database class I would suggest taking this with Oliver these are just my personal preferences as far as people who I think teach the course in a way that's rigorous and we'll give you some chances of hack on stuff so Oliver teach is a very nice version of this class where you know and he and I share a lot of the same approach to sort of how we do this so you know the classes of limitation have you get to build real things you know a lot of the grading is automated its performance driven so that's that's an eClass distributed systems so Steve's version of this class is from what I hear pretty cool some people are taking that now anyone taking that now is it good yeah ok so a lot of the graduate students take these two classes together this is a good option this is hot in the spring by steep I think although I don't know about next year no promise networking again another how many people know something about a computer network ok like you guys should yeah come on the Internet right like let's so you can't graduate from this is why people are like oh you be graduates don't know anything about how computers actually work I mean we should study and you should study something about networking before you leave right that's kind of a component of the modern computing environment so Demetrios again teaches that I think a nice version of class there's some cool assignments people ride with students took that as well with Demetrios it's good ok yeah so the day says it's good what dave says it's good I trust Dave's opinion of other classes there's also some of the graduate level I don't you know again my interest and the schedule here is waning but the I think there's this class taught sometimes by Steve or by other people course on advanced computer systems some more about sort of a project-based cried over class I do think undergraduates have taken this class but we have to do weird things to could you guys credit for it yeah so let me make sure not to let you leave without a ringing deed or sment of C as a programming language okay C is a miserable terrible programming language it was invented a long time ago it's not C's fault it's just old right programming languages don't age well unlike wines and bourbon and other things like that like you don't say wow you know what I've had a great whiff of C you know it's been in the bottle since 1960 okay C is an old language and it's not a like it do not I'll just put it this way do not start a project in C unless you have no other choice if you go to a company and they're like our entire software stack is in C I would be a little bit worried you know unless you're writing like Colonel device drivers or stuff that's really really low level stay away from C as a programming languages had a lot of lot of ugly problems it's just old you know again I mean C was a very important language a long time ago better options go anyway program to go before okay so all the tests one sixty one tool is written and go it's awesome it works really well rust anybody written themselves some rust do you like rust it's different okay yeah so but actually this is kind of these this is cool because these languages are new so there was this long period of time where kind of if you wanted to do systems programming and really get things to work quickly which is not always a design requirement I mean my biggest piece of advice is don't use any of these languages if you don't have to like write in Python it be done if it doesn't really have to screen but once you have to build things that scale really hard or have really really good performance things like these systems programming languages are good options but there's also been a lot of development in this space so both go and rust are relatively new languages relatively new is in you know within the last decade now that these are languages people are using to build real things and they work and they solve a lot of the well-known well understood problems with things like see and I would argue C++ does anyone likes C++ okay interesting anyway I've been I criticize C++ a lot but C boeuf listen I really don't know each other very well so I should probably do some seat bolts with programming again but every time I look at C pulses examples online at what food ok anyway these are nice these are nice language it's a lot cleaner than C++ and again really anything but C you know and I would probably say anything but any of these languages until you have a performance problem don't waste time you know getting things to go fast before you need to okay the last thing I would point out I mean is you guys develop these incredible skills I mean I saw this poster up in there there's a version of this poster up in the computer laboratory in Cambridge UK about a couple months ago and I'm now I've never seen this before but I really feel like this describes my life now and I think your lives is is you get better at programming I mean you guys can really solve any problem you want the question is just what should you work on like what you know problems should you tackle and I would think carefully about that because simply you just don't have enough time right I have about six software projects sitting around just personal things that I would like to do and then probably that many different other tools I would like to build that are professionally related the the barrier for you starts to be just time in the day time in the week rather than the specific ability to solve any of these problems I know I can build all these things maybe I'm just an egotistical until I'm overconfident just probably also true but but I know I don't see any like technical limitations to doing these things I want to do I just don't have time to do them all and so thinking about what you work on and the kind of projects that you tackle becomes really important this is also of course true when you pick a job because you're going to spend a lot of time working on just you know one or two things and you'll be able to do those things and you'll build cool stuff but there's lots and lots of things that you're going to look at as a computer scientist be like I could do a better job of that and not have time to because he'll be doing other stuff all right back to the questions any questions about the exam otherwise we can make this a very very short class go out into the spring weather there might be yeah no guarantees yeah you will have to let's put it this way what is certain is that you will have to answer one medium question and two long answer questions there may or may not be multiple options there just depends on how motivated I am between now and Sunday night okay so this yeah yeah yeah well let's move this way it's not all new questions huh whether it's a mixture or not I don't know um you know again the midterm was supposed to be a mixture of new and old but yeah I mean look I can I still have a few questions that I haven't it's so frustrating though now would get when I write exam questions because I'll be like I have this great idea for a question and I start I start writing it down and I'm like wait I go back it's like on the tune 2013 final yeah I've already used it so most of my ideas I'm like oh let's new I have a short memory so but you know the Internet does not yeah there will be there definitely will be repeats from past years there hopefully will be at least a few questions yeah oh good question what papers did we go over I mean there may be questions on paravirtualization I think like the hint stuff is fair game I mean that's pretty general there won't be I mean the the high level stuff that we discussed in class is fair game on the papers there won't be questions about details of the papers that you know we didn't ask you to to to look at carefully or stuff that we didn't talk about in class yeah but like comparing full and paravirtualization as a technique and talking about what's different about them like that would be fair game right that's stuff that we describe to class but no deep deep details yeah cover the MITx eternal we did not yeah so there are there are a few things from past exams that we didn't cover this year that's a great point we didn't talk about OS structure kind of a boring lecture we didn't talk about the the Mickens work on browser virtualization we didn't do the Linux performance paper that we looked at last year the content has changed a little bit year-to-year so if you see something on an old exam a question that's like reference a material that you don't think that we covered then you know look at the slides but it's possible there were some things that didn't get covered this year and the people want I can try to put right some of them down in a post those are the ones that come to mind immediately okay so you guys did you know this class did extremely well on the assignments I don't have the graph up here but I went back for fun and sort of pulled statistics from the last few years and even well I mean you guys did by the time people gave up on assignment 3.3 you know you guys did a little bit better than last year's class overall which I think this is pretty impressive I mean I know that this is somewhat of a self-selected group at the same time there are more undergraduates in this class the undergraduates historically have tended to do not as well on the assignments as the graduate students so I think those two things balance each other out but I think overall you guys did really well I'm looking forward to sharing the leaderboard with some people I know you know I do have people that approached me saying you know can you identify you know strong programmers to work at my company and I don't do that anymore I just send in that link so if you're still working on assignment 343 and you're trying to get up there I mean that doesn't stop going away I send that link to people all the time all throughout the year you know and I know that there's people that have at least that's helped them get a job right so good luck on the exam I will see you guys on Monday thanks for a great semester [Applause]