In the final year of my degree, we were required to do an individual project chosen either from a prescribed list of possibilities or optionally your own idea (staff approved). The ones I fancied on the list were taken by other students so I ended up choosing my own. At the time I didn’t really know my way around graphics (who am I kidding, I still don’t), so as a vehicle to learn a bit about OpenGL I endeavoured to write a tool that would render the call graph of an arbitrary application in real time.
The time spent in each function could be visualised on the rendered graph, so in that sense it was a real time visualising profiler, hence the name rtprof. I think my supervisors were initially pretty sceptical about my ability to pull this off; perhaps this is unfair but academic computer scientists tend to have a more theoretical/mathematical angle to their work than actual engineering so maybe from their point of view their scepticism was well founded. Nevertheless I did pull it off and, if I remember correctly, was eventually awarded a grade of 92%.
My principle supervisor tried and failed to persuade me to do a PhD, but he did succeed in cajoling me into entering my project into the annual ScotlandIS awards, which to my surprise I won. For this I got a rather unfortunately shaped trophy, but also a cheque for £1250, roughly 3 weeks salary at the time. I can’t remember what I spent it on, but it was probably bike parts. This project would prove be foreshadowing things I got up to later in my career…
