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Why I wrote a blog of ``A personal annotations of Veach's thesis.''

This is not a story about paper/mathematics/computer science, this is my story and I will be happy if you could find something interesting.

Finally today (2010-9-15(Wed)), I finished the Veach's thesis. This is one of the best papers I've ever read. I have still many questions, but, I hope I got the main ideas. This is not exactly a paper of my area, but this is related with the basic technology I work on. My colleagues recommended me this paper. I partially read it last April and found it interesting, though, I did not continue until June.

Our customers use our library, so our customers are developers. My task is helping them. When I joined the company, I worked as a developer for around two years. I was lucky to have a talented colleague and a great boss. It was fun to contribute a product. Our team had a success in 2008, for example, our optimizer made our other product more than 10 times faster. We had a demo in summer. But, at 2008 fall, the crisis came. My team just had a product, therefore, no customer yet. The company decided that no customers, no department. I was a bit sad, but also understandable. We built a new department that concentrate to care the customers and I was assigned to that department. First I even could not speak customers directory. But, now my responsibility becomes larger and I assign some tasks to others and talk with the customers. In one project, I had a full responsibility and I even managed our managers. It turns out I could do this well. But, I realized that I hardly solved technical problems.

I like to solve technical problems. Actually, that was the reason I chose this company. When I realized it, I was not happy anymore. This is a problem. That's my area -- solving a problem. I made a plan to solve the problem, and started to execute it. First I talked with my boss, my current boss is also a nice boss and he understands the situation. Then, I asked a meeting with the upper management. I made a presentation and asked development tasks. I asked a few possibilities to join one of our development teams. One of the answers is that I am not good enough to join the team. It is true, I have not so much experience yet, but I want to have a new challenge. I said I tried to learn, though they think that I might achieve nothing in five to ten years. That sounds an interesting challenge. I like challenges. Now you see, why I read the Veach's paper as my first project. This is one of the projects to make me more useful for the company. Here we have many specialists, I just ask them questions and I can easily get the answers as you have seen in my blog. This environment is great for learning. I also study some more topics now.

Veach's paper is comprehensive and complete. It is fun to read such paper. Some of the mathematics are familiar with me, and some I learned. Today, I am happy that I can keep my word.


Acknowledgements

I thank all my friends who answered my stupid questions. I also thank their great patience. Some of them I recorded in this blog, as ``A personal annotations of Veach's thesis''. I will continue to write some more summary about the paper.

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