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What was Your Senior Project?
Caydel asks: "I am a third year CS major. This year I have a two-semester senior project course in which I can spend two semesters on a project of my choosing. I want to write something very cool, which at the same time provides quite a challenge to me, and serves a useful purpose; however, I am having trouble coming up with good ideas. For those of you out there who have done a similar course, what did you do? What would you have done differently? Which languages did you use? How many skills, that came from outside of your CS courses, did you use?"
Here's an idea... scour sourceforge for a project where the idea is great and the implementation is usable but the code and efficiency is really bad.. then rewrite it from the ground up with elegant code and at the end of it all... submit it for the rest of us to use.
FYI it doesn't have to be a web app either... lots of standalone applications out there too but of course if it can publish reports, logs and status to a web monitor app even better.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
'Cool' and 'Open Source' are nice, but don't make them requirements. The ideal senior project is something you can both get an 'A' on and looks good on your resume. Make you senior project something that you would potentially do at a job you hope to have in the future. If possible, get corporate sponsorship for your project. This is easier than it sounds. Some professor in your school's CS department is probably already in good with some local tech company and has a project waiting to be done right now.
If you project can end up being open source, that's a nice bonus, but it can be a mixed blessing. Believe me, 5 years from now when you've learned how little you knew when you graduated it will be awfully uncomfortable to explain during a job interview why you implemented that code the way you did.
Above all though, don't work on something with no obvious practical applications unless your goal is to get into grad school. A practical project will make you desireable to hiring companies in the same way past job experience would.
I mean a real one, not the SQL crap we have today. One that implements Codd's original ideas as well as recent updates (e.g. The Third Manifesto). Updateable views, user-defined types, arbitrary constraints, type inheritance, declarative syntax, the works.
Please. Somebody do this. Anybody. I have searched high and low and have found exactly 3 products. Two half-finished open source implementations, and Dataphor which is commercial and thus not worth using.
I'm seriously thinking of going back to school just so I can study databases and learn how to write one. I have written a couple attempts in Lisp and Ruby and I just don't have the brains to finish them.
octave needs a hell of a lot of work. some suggestions:
.oct functions which can read a multitude of image formats, write a multitude of image formats, display images, implement the equivalent of ginput, and provide the basic functionality of the image processing toolkit (if you pick this and do a good job, i will buy you dinner). what meagre image processing functions octave has all fork off a copy of imagemagick, which is *painfully* slow
.oct functions to read and create movies (possibly as part of #3)
/wrong/ results last time i used it). major bonus points for implementing matrix factorizations, and eigendecompositions
1) a non-sucky plotting interface (there are some packages which claim to do just this, but i can't get bloody VTK to compile, so they're basically useless)
2) an optimization engine for octave
3)
4)
all of these projects demonstrate several key skills: good c++, good matlab, and the fundamentals of engineering with existing code.
other suggestions:
5) something like mtl (matrix template library, c++ code which uses expression templates and what not to try to help the compiler produce optimized code) that doesn't suck (their lu factorization produced plain
6) fix gnu's binutils so that they can use libraries generated by VC++
7) an optimized c++ toolkit for developing digital video processing and computer vision software under linux. i envision this as a kind of directshow lite --- you'd supply standard interfaces and a set of plugins providing basic transforms (color space conversions, for example), thread pools, and a nice gui to edit processing graphs and run them
incidentally, most of these things have been on my todo list for a long time. i think i'm going to crack at least the image reading and display portion of #4 over labor day weekend.
Amusing anecdote: I was an undergrad at the University of Missouri, Rolla and bored in my Senior AI course. Well, a little bored. We seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time studying Expert Systems, a path that I thought would yield little fruit in achieving true machine intelligence.
After one of the Expert System lectures I asked Professor Arlan DeKock whether Expert Systems didn't seem a little bit too much like more sophisticated if-then-else branching systems, perhaps with a bit of if-then-else-maybe thrown in. He considered that for a little while and asked what I'd rather be working on. I said Natural Language Processing. Perhaps something like Zork.
He said, "Well, isn't that just a slightly more sophisticated version of a compiler?" He had me a little bit, but I was willing to give it a shot. He told me I'd never finish it by the end of the semester. That sounded like a challenge, so I took him up on it.
I did a ton of research on NL parsing and imperative command processing and eventually learned a ton about linguistics, Zork, object-oriented programming and AST parsing in LISP. A fantastic adventure. (Thank you Messrs. Winston and Horn)
As to when I finished, well, believe it or not I actually had a minimal space adventure coded and tested and ready to demo for Dr. DeKock 3 minutes before it was time. Of course, my other studies took a *slight* hit. 8-)
The really crazy thing was that the good Doctor was getting into and playing the adventure. One of the puzzles in the adventure prevented you from leaving a room until you gave a can of oil to a robot. He would block your way to the exit otherwise. Rather than solving the puzzle the inteded way, the professor picked up the robot and put him in his backpack. I didn't take physics into account and my adventure let him do that. He then exited the room and the robot could do nothing. The game / adventure actually let him do that and handled it properly.
I was a little dismayed that the *user* won by doing something I hadn't expected, but I was thrilled that my system was logically processing a world that in a moderately sophisticated way.
I got an A.
Then I got some sleep.
My project was a computer engineering project. We controlled a bunch of simple devices over the web through a server that we had set up.
One thing I learned was to have backup plans and modularity. We listed somewhere between 6-8 devices that we thought might work. We ended up getting 3 of them to work.
What was nice about that was that we could still deliver those 3 devices (which showed up the project that presented right after us which picked a single device and got it to work in a similar fashion).
But we also could scale the amount of work. If things had gone better, and we'd had a little more time, we could have added another device or two. As it is, it took us the semester to get what we did working.
I'd reccomend trying to pick a similar project where you can get a basic set of features working relatively easily, but also have a bunch of other interesting features that you can bring out if you have the time for them. That way you're guaranteed a project that does something right, and the ability to challenge yourself if you need to.
Also, always make sure to have more than one method for doing each part of the project. Inevitably you figure out that something isn't going to work out the way that you thought it would. We had to start from scratch on portions of the project a couple of times. It was immensely helpful to have a solid backup plan to start working on right away.
Hope that helps.