Done with exams et al, so working on my dissertation for the summer here on out, not that it’s looking much like summer yet. My driving test is also this Thursday, but that’s the last impending piece of stress on the horizon, fingers crossed.

It’s nice to be at the beginning of a long project! The last dissertation I wrote was my undergrad English piece back in 2018. As far as I remember I was doing that alongside other work, so I didn’t have time exclusively set aside for it. I was in a lot better working habits then than for the first year or so of my course, setting deadlines along the way, not leaving things until the last minute. My organizations matured just a bit further since then, so I’m reasonably excited to see how this one will go.

The most daunting part about it at the moment is that there’s nothing else to procrastinate with, there’s only one thing to focus on. Procrastinating by working on different work has become a major part of my productivity recently. It’s a good way to keep going when I’m stuck, or just unmotivated for something else. So I have to make sure there are distinct chunks and parts I can work on throughout in case I need to dislodge myself with progress elsewhere. The handy thing about a CS dissertation is that you have the coding as well as the writing and theory to be dealing with, so there’s already a nice topical split. I’m expecting both to be about equally difficult. After Frost, writing is the process of having ideas, and coding is having ideas first and then solving all of the engineering problems that they generate.

From tomorrow (24th May) I’ve got around 70 working days until my deadline, so I need to write an average of 300 words a day, code everything needed for the project and run my experiments in time. Will be making notes here on how it’s going along the way. I also need to start cracking on with my job search. The plan is still to get over to Canada as soon as I can, and applying for development jobs there is a good next step while I work on finishing the degree.

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