I'm six months away from getting MSc in computer Engineering and I am reading papers to write a journal and thesis; I have wrote one paper. But for the past one and half year, I felt like the whole thing was a research in search of a problem. That is, first proposing a problem and then come up with a solution that claims to mitigate the stated problem and write a paper to convince people to buy my solution.
What is frustrating me is, I have never developed a medium sized software let alone big one. I started this MSc program thinking that it was course based and that I would find enough time to participate in open source projects like Apache. Instead, I have spent my time reading papers and getting angry to the extent that I burned out.
I love computing, especially exploiting hardware using software. I have taught myself many things on this field. I have good understanding of Software Engineering, Operating System and Computer Architecture. But these are more theoretical. I feel like a pianist who doesn't know how to play piano. Yea, that sounds an oxymoron but seriously, what good is a Computer Engineer if he cannot develop big software?
Afterall, writing a good paper sometimes entails developing a good software to justify the claim or to act as a prototype. For example, the paper MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters was written by the very people who build that system on Google.
What do you think?
