So it’s been a long time coming, but as of Thursday, June 30th,1 I’m officially a doctor! If you want, you can read my final dissertation here. It seems like the cool thing to do is to share the graph of commits over time, so here it is:

Graph of commits over time

It should be obvious from the giant peak in around October of last year that I defended in November of 2015. In a perfect world I would have immediately made all the changes requested by my committee and finished up no later than December. Instead, I moved to California. Finally around May or so I felt settled enough in my new station in life that I could go finish up my nagging dissertation. You can of course see this in the flurry of activity around May or June on the graph.

I’m glad to be done!

It’s been a long road, and I’ve been fortunate to have tons of supportive people along the way to help out. A Ph.D. is really too big of a task for just one person, so even though I’m the one who gets to put the extra letters after my name if I want, I’m truly grateful for everyone who has helped along the way!

I mentioned earlier that I moved to California. Back in January I started working at Google, doing some really fun stuff with WebAssembly. I’m hoping in my new post grad school life I’ll also get the chance to revisit some personal projects I put on the back burner in order to graduate. One of those projects is blogging more. It’s been over two years since my last post, and I honestly find that a little bit embarrassing. Of course, the reality is that it always seems like I’ll have more time in the future than I actually end up having, so we’ll have to see.

  1. I realize this post is pretty late as well. So it goes. ↩