Daily misery

More than 24 hours after watching this movie, I’m still writing this review with a wrenching heartache, an unforeseen after-effects to which I place all the blames to the beautiful story itself and Mr Sean Penn’s fetish and sadistic addiction in making every movies he’s involved in as an actor or as a director so criminally sad.

I would have given it a 10 stars but then I took 6 stars away because I’m still sad :(. It’s a sad, sad ending to a happy journey. I can’t stop thinking about questions like what about the old dude who had wanted to adopt him as his son, or Vince Vaughn who had obviously taken an immense liking to him, or the hippies living in the trailer, or the 16 years old girl who by the way is the most precious looking creature ever alive on earth, or his parents and most importantly, his beloved sister? They will never see this boy again. This boy who gave everything away and embarked on a journey to Alaska and happened to cross path with the life of all the people mentioned above. No matter how short the encounter was, he left a sizable pile of emotional leftovers for every one of them. What the fuck, this is so fucking sad.

I told you this is not a real review and I won’t apologize for over-using the word ’sad’.

Here’s something to ease the pain - Kristin Stewart has been inducted into my hall of fame. Here’s why :)

But still, damn it. what the fuck.

I think CS program should put more emphasis on the title statement. The difference between homework programming and real world programming is, generally speaking, you most likely will be asked to maintain a codebase and that doesn’t usually involve writing hundred lines of codes per day. I learned it the hard way. Having already been ‘in the wild’ for a few years now, and lurking around various OSS projects, I can see newbies are still learning it my way :(.

Some fresh CS graduates walk into the real world thinking they will take ownership of a codebase and be asked to solve problems right away. Since some of them might have limited experience in collaborative coding environment (I can count in one hand the number of times I was involved in group programming projects during my 4 years in college), they choose not to study the existing codebase. It’s bad, they basically would choose to rewrite everything every time because it’s hard to maintain existing codes that are written by some schmucks they don’t know.

I think more credit hours should be allocated to courses that teach proper coding guidelines: how to write good comments, existing coding standards, why Unix tab parameter is different than say, a Windows system, source control and whatnots. It will be a boring course, but an important one nonetheless.