The Computer Science Program in Singapore: Where innovation is marked down.
I'd like to share a snipplet of life as a computer science undergrad in National University of Singapore. A little background information:
Last semester before my stint as an intern at Videoplaza (hey guys!:D), I took up a course known as Software Engineering. Microsoft kinda sponsored the course. It was a 8 modular credit course, that meant an equivalent of 2 normal courses. That made this a huge course. The course scope was well, basically, for teams to put software engineering skills into practise. Iterative programmiing, revision control, software architectural design. You get the gist. The course requirement was for teams to engage software engineering skills to develop a file syncing tool, with C#.
Well, as a full time Archlinux user, I hated that I had to code a full app for a platform I don't even use. I was the leader of my team, and with a little bit of persuasion, I managed to convince my team to go with Mono, and to develop the app to work cross-platform. While everyone was working with WPF, .NET, blabla. My team did some crazy stuff like using SVN to sync files (instead of writing our own backend for syncing), GTK for GUI, iKVM to use SVNKit in Mono, blabla. It was a hell of a course, but we managed to pull through, and our plan to re-use open-sourced components meant we could focus on features, and learning new frameworks. Also, how cool would it be to go rogue on a Microsoft sponsored course?
My team won 2nd place when M$ came down to reviewed the apps after they were done. However, the team was awarded B+ as a grade, and myself, as a A+ only because my peers graded me highly on a peer review appraisal. It bothered me. The code wasn't that bad (review it at http://code.google.com/p/subsynct/), we met with some serious obstacles and overcome it anyways, and within a tight timeframe. I was proud of the result, and of my team's effort.
It made no sense to me how my team only deserved a B+.
And so after months of back-headed nagging, I shot an email to my professor for some clarifications: http://pastebin.com/APXEcFG4
Here is his reply: http://pastebin.com/paMntaY2
And heres my final reply: http://pastebin.com/DHSt1dkg
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Just an example of how innovation is discouraged and frowned upon in an Asian context. One of the main reasons why technology entrepreneurial activities is in such a poor state in Singapore.
PS: Don't use the app, it was a proof-of-concept. SVN really suck balls in performance for binary files. We learnt this the hard way.