This Week in MIT Distributed Systems: 1

This past week, I did not manage my time well to be quite honest. And that ended up leading to me not finishing Lab 1 (Distributed MapReduce).

I ended up reading both papers earlier in the week and doing the required questions for each. I did them early in the week because I knew I was going to have no time at all on Wednesday, so I was looking ahead there.

Where It Went Wrong

But in terms of the lab, I did not manage my time well at all. I should have consistently been working on it a couple of hours each day from the get-go but that isn't what happened. Some days I worked on it, others I didn't. I didn't end up getting it done in time and I've used up most of my 72 allowed late hours allotted by the course making steady progress on it, but it's still not finished. I ended up reliably getting it to run the map part of the process in a distributed fashion and emit intermediate files meant to be read by the reduce part, but that's it. And that was only with 6 hours or so of concentrated work over over a couple of days. I'm pretty certain I could have finished it if I did that same level of consistent, concentrated effort over the last week instead.

Moving Forward

So, what do I do now? As of me writing this, I have a little under 8 hours of the 72 hours left before I have no more hours. I want to save the remaining hours in case of actual emergency so I'm just gonna hand in what I have and take the L. What I learned here is that a consistent two hours everyday goes so much further for something like this than a hectic day trying to figure out where I am and need to go in order to finish a project I was given two week to do in one day. This is easy when it's for a job and you have to show up everyday. You don't even think about it, that scheduling aspect is more or less taken care of for you. But when it's left up to you and you don't explicitly deal with your laziness demons beforehand, it may not turn out so great.

All I can do from here on out is be consistent in my studying and movement forward on the labs. And that's what I'm going to do.