I finished my MA degree at the University of Washington. Many thanks to the faculty and staff that helped me finish. Many thanks to my wife and family that supported me while I struggled through it.
However, this week I was reminded that there are limits to how much you can learn in a degree program that lasts only 5 quarters. A blog at LingPipe (a review of my blog) (lingpipe-blog.com) pointed out several errors in what I had written about here in one of my posts. Well, lucky for me I hadn’t intended the text to be submitted to a conference jury for review. The paper was just a one-week assignment. As I remember, I passed the class, so the paper probably met the requirements for the course even though it has very clear short comings in the eye of the LingPipe reviewer.
Maybe I will find the time to dig out the code that was used for that paper, and compare it against the evaluation at LingPipe and see if I can understand what the LingPipe objections were. I might even try to re-implement the code following the expert’s directions.
Another way I look at this is: the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know. It has been healthy for me to receive some constructive criticism of my post. I have been writing software for only 30 years, so maybe in the next 30 years, I can learn how to fix the problems that LingPipe pointed out. For now, I am just an average software engineer. Code reviews are part of the process.