Here's to a repeat of last week!

Another week of typically meager work life balance has come to an end. However, this week, I have more good to report than bad...yay! :)

Good:

I had an irregular number of meetings this week, mainly with my co-advisors Dr. E and Sarah. Typically I am a nervous wreck going into these meetings (this week was no different) and come out feeling slightly more pessimistic about getting my degree than I did going in. This week, however, was different. Not because I walked out of one meeting feeling optimistic, but because I left three meeting feeling optimistic regardless of the setbacks that may have been discussed :D. My advisor who I've been working with from the start feels that my progress has improved and for the first time in the 4 years I've been at NC State my advisor didn't name any things to be improved that I didn't come up with myself. It may seem like it would be better news to have no things that need improvement at all, but if you've ever done research or attempted to attain a PhD you know that's completely unrealistic :)

Not so good:

I'm still finding bugs in APATIAN. Just a little background, APATIAN mines GitHub software repositories for concept application and feature usage -- the goal of this prototype is to show the possibility of building an accurate model of developer knowledge. The prototype is doing what I want it to do, however, more often than it should; this skews my "knowledge values" which is no good.  For example, I just realized that the list of revisions being used was twice as long as it should be; this meant that when I ran my code it would go through all revisions twice. There's also the possibility that my counts are getting added redundantly when files are renamed or moved. I will report back when I know more...

Silver lining:

Boa. There exists some research on mining software repositories for feature usage that might provide some insights (or source code) that I can use to deal with some of the current limitations of my prototype. I've enjoyed building this from the ground up but it's getting to the point where I think I need to outsource as often as I can (that's if I want to finish in the next couple of years). 

I've been a bit under the weather over the past week or so (and things my personal life aren't the greatest) but weeks like this past week give me hope that I'm where I should be and that if I keep working hard it will all pay off. Until next time... :)