The University of Texas at Austin

This page contains links to a variety of professional development materials edited by Mike Dahlin, Kathryn McKinley, Risto Mikkulainen, and others.

What's included in the Powerpoint:

Overview & What we are doing to help you succeed, J Moore, Department Chair
Starting a research career & picking an advisor, Emery Berger, Assistant Prof at UMass (UT graduate)
What your advisor can do for you & managing your advisor, Doug Burger, Associate Professor
Communication skills - I speek pretty now, Mike Dahlin, Associate Professor
Networking, Pete Manolios, Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech (UT graduate)
What it takes to land academic interviews & how to create it, - Kathryn McKinley, Professor
Preparing for an academic interview, Karu Sankaralingam, Graduate Student
What I did right, what I would change, & other general advice, Long Huang, Graduate Student
What I did right, what I would change, & other general advice, JP Martin, Graduate Student

Futher links to career advice:

Computing Research Association (CRA),
- Graduate Student Information guide, and lots of other great career advice
How to Have a Bad Career in Research/Academia (PDF), David Patterson
Pithy advice for researchers, Mike Dahlin
Pithy advice for graduate school (Powerpoint), Rachel Pottinger & Kathryn McKinley, June 2005.
Accreted wisdom related to computer science, Armando Fox

Courses, Tools, and Resources for Research, tailored to AI , Risto Mikkulainen and others. If it asks for a password (i.e., if you are accessing it from an off campus host), use user "nn" and password "$igmoid".

Writing Solid Code
- Steve McGuire. Some of the specific techniques are dated, but the attitude is timeless. Learn to think this way and you will build better systems with less effort. Debugging the Development Process also by McGuire is also worth reading if you can get a copy (it is currently out of print.) (p 164--167 of Debugging is highly recommended)
Hints for Computer System Design , B. W. Lampson. Proc. of the 9th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October 1983, pp. 33-48.
Coping with complexity (PDF) Jerome H. Saltzer (MIT)
End-to-end Arguments in System Design (PDF), Saltzer J., Reed D. and Clark D., ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 195-206, 1984.
Basic statistics (PDF) for systems research from Eric Brewer
C. A. R. Hoare. The Emperor's Old Clothes. Communications of the ACM, Vo. 24, No. 2, February 1981, pp. 75-83.

Sermons on system building and career as system designer (for undergraduate OS class)

Some suggested standards to follow:

The Department of Computer Sciences