Comment by vvanders
5 years ago
Bruce Dawson taught a 100 level class at the college I attended, it's been a while but I think the class title was something around image processing. The first or second assignment was to copy one image region into another, little did we know that we implemented bit blit.
After turning in the assignment the next class he grabbed one random assignment from the class and added some quick benchmark instrumentation and if I remember right then asked the class how fast we think it could run. The next 30 minutes was a total geek out on cache lines, prefetching, alignment and all the other dark arts of performance optimizations. I don't remember how fast he got it to go over the naive for loop but it was many orders of magnitude. There's a few classes that really stick with you and that was definitely one of them.
The only thing that stands out to me in college are the 100 level classes at the beginning and the 400 level classes in the middle that werent in my major
Maybe its the imposter syndrome coupled with actually being unqualified and incompetent which makes those classes stand out
But we can just pretend its only imposter syndrome
Anyone know of any profs like this at UIUC?
Angrave was very memorable for me for CS241 Systems Programming (2016?). To this day my threading understanding is unparalleled to that of my colleagues due to him and that class.
Looks like it still exists https://cs241.cs.illinois.edu/ and I can imagine this was a difficult course, you have challenging assignments on a weekly basis judging from the descriptions.
Barton Miller is like this at UW-Madison