A (Not So) Brief Update On My Life And What I Want To Do With This Website, Now That I’m Doing A PhD And Have Just Co-Hosted My First Conference Presentation

So… what did I miss?

Well, a lot has happened since I last wrote a blog post, in July 2023, for my second anniversary of my proper switch to Linux. The third anniversary is coming up soon, so I want to get a post written for that.

There’s actually a lot I want to go through, so I won’t go through all of it now. And even if I go through something here, it won’t be in that much depth, and I’ll probably do a more thorough follow-up post on it.

What I mainly want to talk about does require some preliminary context. In my previous blog post, you’ll see that I briefly mention that now that I have graduated, I didn’t know what I wanted to do next: “Maybe a job? Maybe further academic work?” You’ll find that quoted bit in the section “My Life Now That I Graduated”. I also mentioned getting my CV and the site’s corresponding page reorganised; I actually worked on another CV in DOCX form to apply for some graduate jobs during that time, which unfortunately I never managed to get, and I haven’t uploaded them to this site yet, which I must get to at some point. But between then and now, I must’ve been making something out of my degree, right?

Well, thankfully, I have, and it’s something that, if you told 18-year-old me I’d do, I’d laugh at. I’m actually doing a PhD.

Yeah.

I know, right? Didn’t expect that, did you?

Well, that’s what I’m doing. I returned to King’s College London in February this year. My supervisor is Dr Kevin Lano, and I’ll be working on a Model-Driven Engineering related project in which I continue the work he’s doing with Dr Howard Haughton on a modelling language called MathOCL. Besides that, I’m also doing some other research work with him in relevant areas.

Recently, I was brought in to do some evaluation work on a project Dr Kevin had been working on, to do with software sustainability in MDE tools. “Software sustainability”, as the name suggests, simply refers to how software can be made to mitigate and/or reduce its power consumption and, therefore, its impact on our so so sorry state of an environment. The evaluation work I carried out involved running some code and then measuring its power consumption, using 2 different methods to do so (let’s just say, one is way more efficient than the other, though that one works mainly, if not only, with the Java platform). I really enjoyed getting to work on this project with him, and it was fascinating to see how our code can impact the environment and how we can mitigate said impact in the way we write our code.

This evaluation work ended up being my first ever paid job (I know, right? Zishan finally got a job!). I got paid £20 an hour for 3.5 hours a week. That’s £70 a week for my work on this project. And now, said project is part of a paper that was submitted to a conference, which I’m excited for. I’m also listed as a co-author on the corresponding paper alongside Dr Kevin and Dr Lyan Alwakeel, which I’m only just gradually getting used to now, especially as I’ll get more and more credits as I progress with my PhD. And guess what? This paper has been accepted to a conference, and I’ll be co-hosting our paper’s presentation with Dr Kevin! And that presentation is happening… it already happened. Today.

Yep. I was up early in Wednesday morning getting ready to virtually join the Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations 2024 conference, which is actually taking place in-person in the Netherlands right now, from the 8^th of July to the 11^th, even though I and Dr Kevin are attending virtually. Our paper and presentation are part of the “Agile MDE” workshop taking place at STAF 2024 tomorrow. Our paper’s called “Software modelling for sustainable software engineering” – and there’s my name as one of the co-authors and co-presenters! The research carried out for this paper and conference will hopefully be the start of further improvements towards reducing MDE’s impact on the environment and providing MDE another benefit to developers alike. I’ll go further into MDE and what it means in a future blog article. Just know that it’s a kind of software development discipline intended to (1) make it easier for developers to generate working, robust and functional code (and/or some other things too, such as text files containing data for (i.e.) forms to fill in) and (2) also make it easier for end users in a specific area, who are not well-versed in computer programming, to use computer software for their area of expertise, using specialised “domain-specific languages” designed and worked on by developers who work on or with MDE toolsets such as AgileUML. As for how the presentation went, as far as first tries go, this one wasn’t too bad. I’d say it went quite well, considering I’ve never done this before. Dr Kevin and I had 20 allocated minutes to go through the 24 slides we prepared, so we had to do things as quickly as possible without rushing too much and making sure we were always clear in what we were saying (and yes, of course, we did indeed practice beforehand). Generally, I think I got across the points I needed to get across, and I made sure not to spend too long on a particular slide or piece of information, for reasons just explained. I did have a small stammer while presenting, but as I do more and more presentations (and I will do more and more presentations), that stammer should hopefully fade away gradually. I’ll let you know where you can find the paper we worked on in a later blog post.

This is just the beginning of a new stage in my personal development, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t exactly know what I’ll do with my PhD once I actually acquire the right to call myself a Doctor (heheh). I’m uhmming-‘n’-aahing about either taking my PhD into industry work in software development, becoming a researcher (maybe even a lecturer?) at a university, or both! The door’s wide open for now, and I’m not ready to close it just yet. Until the time comes where my PhD thesis is done and I don that graduation robe again, I’ll keep on keeping on as I’ve always kept on.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article so far. I know I haven’t been active with this website for a long time. I only recently started taking it seriously again, and it’s in need of some updates and other changes. I intermittently changed my bio to indicate my current (or then-current) student/graduate status, but I didn’t do anything serious with it until now. Simple reason: I didn’t have a suitable development environment for Jekyll and GitHub Pages set up. I don’t remember the details exactly, so I could be very wrong in my recollection of events here, but I think my old one must’ve gotten borked somehow when I updated from Linux Mint 20.3 to 21 on my red laptop (more on that in a bit), and then I never really bothered to see what was wrong with it at the time. That was so long ago that I didn’t even have a proper development environment set up when I wrote my previous blog post! I had to write the markdown file in a number of hours and then push it straight to GitHub and hope for the best! If you’ve read my previous blog post, you’ll see that it thankfully did turn out right, but it’s worth noting that blindly pushing trivial, and even non-trivial, changes like this without testing them first is not a viable practice in a software development environment of any sort. Do this kind of thing for an important program and everyone will hate you. So don’t do it.

Recently, though, I did manage to get a development environment set up again (hey, there’s a future blog post idea!), so I’ve been making sure this post reads right and the website still runs as it should (by running bundle exec jekyll serve --incremental in the terminal and then refreshing the page in Firefox every time to see how this post will read when it goes live). With that, it’s back to work, continuing my research, getting back into writing again and making the changes I want to make. I have a lot I want to write about now, whether it be my PhD work, my other projects, my interests, my views and opinions on things, and/or just life in general.

Oh yeah, that red Acer laptop? It got borked last year. It lasted quite a while as well (about 7 years), but now it just won’t boot up anymore. Sad.

So, when the time came to rejoin KCL, I was given an opportunity, by the Informatics department at KCL, to borrow a new Dell Latitude 7340 laptop for free to do my work on (they do this for all incoming Computer Science PhD students). It came with Windows 10 pre-installed, which I didn’t want, so with their blessing, and a BIOS password reset, they allowed me to install Linux Mint 21.3 on it, wiping out everything else that was there. After some driver installations, everything is now set up and should be working fine. They held out an option for a higher-spec laptop should a student need it for their research, but for the research I’m carrying out, the “lower-spec” default is more than enough. Way more than enough, in fact! 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and 10 physical cores (12 logical ones!!!), for a laptop of its size, is something I never ever possessed in my computing life, so to have gotten it to borrow basically for free? Man!

I’ll most likely (almost certainly) have to return the device after my PhD is finished, so I’m still holding out for a new laptop purchase at some point, but that’s a long-term future thing (waaaaaay in the future). I’m not in immediate need of another laptop now, so I use my uni laptop for basically everything (not just research, but also games and other creative and non-creative endeavours). I do miss having a numpad and the many ports my old laptop had. That one had 3 USB ports and an SD card slot, which came in handy when taking pictures with a hand-me-down camera, whereas this one only has 1 USB port, 2 USB-C ports (one for charging) and no SD card slot. I want to purchase a USB-C hub and an external SATA reader to obtain data from my old red laptop’s interal SSD after so long, but, again, those are long-term future things.

One final thing before I (try to) wrap this up: I also set up two more pages, a Donate page and an About page. I added them in-between the tags and CV pages on my site’s masthead menu, and both of these pages will be expanded at some point in the future. I’m setting up the donation page as essentially an online tip jar, so that anyone who wants to send me a tad bit of money can do so. The money I’m earning for the project I worked on with Dr Kevin is going to dry up very soon, if it hasn’t done so already, so this is basically just a tip jar for goodwilled donations while I keep searching for part-time temp jobs and other small earners, and wait until October when I (hopefully) become a Teaching Assistant for several modules in the Computer Science courses they offer at KCL (which will allow me to earn a considerable amount of money, I’m sure). For both now and the future, though, I’m setting up this donation page so that I can try and (1) earn a tad bit of cash for my writing here, (2) earn a tad bit of cash for my open-source contributions, and even just (3) earn a tad bit of cash for my other non-PhD projects and creative endeavours. I’d like to set up multiple payment methods at some point. I initially considered doing this through bank transfer by emailing my bank details to prospective donors, but that opens up a metric ton (and then some) of trust and security issues that I hope should be obvious to you, dear reader, and anyone else reading this and/or considering opening donations towards their way like that, so I’m not making that mistake, and you probably shouldn’t either. For now, I’ll be using Buy Me a Coffee for one-time donations. I set my page up there on a whim, inspired by Kab, one of my closest friends, who also has his own blog and his own Buy Me a Coffee page. The About page should hopefully be a bit more self-explanatory (well, it is about me (to an extent)), but, as of the time this post goes live, it won’t have much on there at the moment. I’m thinking of doing something funny for it with the Invisible Voice from “All The Small Edits I Have Made To My Website Since September 2021 Up Until Now (30th July 2022)”, but for now, it’ll just have some “Coming Soon”-esque text on it. I’ll get the things I want to complete completed in due course, so do watch this space!

This was way longer than I wanted it to be, especially for a brief(-ish) update on life and my career and what I’ve been doing and what I want to do now. In fact, as of the time this goes live (I may have written longer posts after this), this is my second longest blog post ever! A 13 minute read, when my longest one (as of the moment this goes live) is a 15 minute read! And that one had pictures, whereas this is all text! I never thought I’d be able to write that much but, as it turns out, when I can write, and I want to write, and I’m properly motivated to write, I can write! Hopefully I can keep up this motivation in the future across all my work! And I’ve got plenty of work cut out for me now, so off I go, and I shall hopefully see you here soon! Peace!

ADDENDUM: When this post first went live, I wrote that I intended to use the donation field to fund my PhD studies, if only just a tiny bit, but after some discussions and some self-thought, I soon realised that this wasn’t feasible at all, realistically speaking. Even for a tiny little bit of money, a tip jar for PhD funding is still a big ask in my now-revised view, and if I need funds for conferences and fees and other PhD-related things, I’d much rather I procure them elsewhere (through legitimate means, of course). I’ll still be seeking out grants and temp jobs to fund my PhD (I didn’t mention the former in the post itself), but for now, I intend for all of these donations to be strictly for my writing, open-source contributions and other non-PhD projects and creative endeavours. I initially had the offending bits crossed out, but eventually I decided to just rewrite the whole section on why I set up the donation page. I also considered removing this addendum altogether and hiding away the fact that I originally wrote that part this way, and I almost did that, but in this case, for those who have already read it when I went out of my way to send this post to others (this is what excitement does to someone), I decided to keep this addendum so that those who notice something feeling different get their questions answered. The donation page I set up is and was always meant to be a small thing on the side for some occasional passive income (if I’m lucky enough), and it was never meant to contribute a serious amount of money to my PhD funding, for which I’m pursuing other means, such as the aforementioned job and grant search. I’ll go over how I funded my PhD so far in a future post. Thank you for reading this far and until next time. Peace (again)!