Every Master’s student in a research university would have had to face this question at some point during their stay. For some, it’s been a no-brainer. Not for me, it’s easily the most difficult decision I’ve ever faced in my life.

On one hand, there’s the opportunity to work for a corporation, draw a handsome salary and help millions of people today by writing great software. On the other hand, there’s the opportunity to spend the next 5 years of my life with just enough money to survive on ramen, working on a really hard problem no one knows the solution to and derive satisfaction from the fact that my work might help millions of people tomorrow.

Computer science is also one of those fields where getting a PhD doesn’t mean you have to become a professor. Not that I don’t enjoy teaching, as a matter of fact I love teaching, but it’s comforting to know that you can always go back to what you sacrificed. The fruits of research in computer science typically reach mass consumption much faster than other fields, and several silicon valley companies specifically target doctorates for recruiting. Not to mention, you could always dropout — aren’t a lot of great institutions founded that way?

All of this tilts the scale a bit towards PhD, but this decision requires many more months of thinking! What are your thoughts on the matter? Have you had to make such a decision? What did you choose and why?

My last day at Mozilla this summer was last Thursday. I didn’t take a lot of pictures this summer, because, you know, I took a lot last time around. Also, this strategy turned out pretty well because now there are more pictures of me floating around on the tubes! After a longish trans-atlantic flight, I’m back in Amsterdam now resuming work on my Master’s (because hacking on Minix is awesome).

No other internship has been ever so satisfying: over the summer, I worked on a wide range of mini-projects which allowed me to exercise skills ranging from systems to application level programming. I even did a bit of work in the mobile space (turns out programming in limited memory and processing speed is a *lot* different).

One such project that I’m especially excited about is support for video recording in the browser. Yes, there is even a canvas-based live preview of your webcam feed, in addition to Ogg/Theora encoding support! Combined with the audio recording support I wrote sometime ago, some really cool applications are now possible. Skype-like dialer in the browser? Why not?! (*hint* anyone is free to send in a patch for multiplexing the audio and video, they’re currently two separate Vorbis and Theora streams *hint*).

We also had 3 major releases for Weave during the summer: 0.4, 0.5 and 0.6. The last one was especially big, given the completely new, HTML based UI (big kudos to thunder for pulling it off!) and a bunch of other performance fixes. Also, the web UI I wrote last year underwent so many great changes by the wonderful folks at Glaxstar. Now we’re putting up a community design challenge to revamp the UI so we can ship the thing! (*hint* if you’re good at UI design you should participate in the challenge *hint*).

There’s so many more cool things I worked on that I’d like to talk about, but perhaps they deserve a separate blog post. Soon… (I keep promising myself that I should blog more often, it never works).

To add the already good times, my two students in the Summer of Code this year passed with flying colors. Yay!