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Comment by hmottestad | Hacker News Reader

I really wanted do take that course. I had taken the OS course where you build an OS from scratch, so this seemed like the next thing to do. The OS course was for 20 points, but the heterogeneous programming course was only 10 points. People said it was way more work than 10 points though and I ended up dropping it because I couldn't justify spending that much time on it when I had other courses to take and a thesis to write.

Here is the OS course: https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/IN4000/index-eng...

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Just out of curiosity what kind of hard projects did you do at the bachelor level? I had to build a unix shell, implemented some CPU scheduling algorithms (but didn't actually integrate it into a proper OS), did some B-tree stuff as well as implementing JPEG-like algorithms. Probably the one that took the most time was designing a CPU that worked in a real FPGA with its own instruction set and assembler (it was such a pain in the ass to troubleshoot, my crappy laptop took 30 min to compile the project and run simulations).

When I talk to people outside my home country it feels most don't do these kind of things at the bachelor level. But, like you, people who go on a masters then might do one of these things and go much more in-depth than I did.

I designed a cut down ARM core that ran on a FPGA. Then wrote a compiler to run mmy own code on it.

That's "full stack" development :)

Also wrote a BBC Micro emulator, which was great fun.

Got anY blog or write-up on that?

That sounds fun, I designed the instruction set on my CPU myself and I didn't get around writing a compiler for it (I only wrote an assembler).

Since I designed the instruction set I made some very quirky design decisions to make the test programs I was writing easier, instructions were 16bit but only 6 bits were used for the instruction so I had a lot of single-word instructions that did a lot of heavy lifting for my programs.

Did you really do that at the bachelor level? I feel like my uni was a bit abnormal on how many hardware classes and projects we had at a bachelor level for computer science.

Yup, did it for my BSc. There was plenty of modules to pick, I just went for the ones that I thought would give me the best experience.

Also wrote a toy kernel, with scheduler etc.

All great fun.

I assume that is Computer Engineering and not a Computer Science degree?

Hah yea I quickly discovered that matnat[1] study points weren't like other study points. Felt like we had to do 2-5x the work compared to the students I knew going to other faculties. But in general the courses were very rewarding I feel.

I heard about the OS one, sounded super cool and also a lot of work from what I gathered. Heard about it too late and required a buddy. Oh well, can't have it all.

[1]: faculty of math and natural sciences

Sounds like the UK too. All my school friend doing non-STEM courses would ask me how many "contact hours" we had per week.

I can't remember exactly how many, but once you included lectures, scheduled labs and tutorials, was not that far from 9-5 (minus the standard university-wide Wednesday afternoon sport slot).

The friends would go quiet and say "oh, we have 12".

And that didn't even incude the "non-contact" hours in the labs grinding the coursework until security shooed us out late at night so they could lock the building. Good times (in retrospect, especially).

Yeah, I did Physics in the UK and it was the same.

Plus in one term there was some miscommunication between the professors and they set us one experiment every week instead of every two weeks, I remember literally working like 12 hour days on the weekends to get all the data analysis and reports done.

We at NTNU used to complain/joke about how you at UiO even got 10 points for your classes, when we had a flat 7,5 sp for each class in Trondheim...

I say used to, but still do. Even 10 years later me and my girlfriend (that studied at UiO) still tease each other about who is the smartest or had the hardest courses, or she mocks my ring, heh.

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