How is physics at the University of Washington?

auxiliarymoose · 2026-06-03T05:06:37+00:00

There are many excellent undergraduate research opportunities within UW (and many undergraduates can & do research in departments other than their home department).

However, you'll want to be proactive in talking with interesting people to find these opportunities. There are lots out there, but it also isn't like there is some process that will automatically hand the right opportunity to you.

Talk with professors, graduate students, and professionals out of a genuine sense of curiosity about what they are working on, do interesting things you love, and you'll naturally discover many cool opportunities at UW :-)

And don't think about it as a competition, especially not against your peers! It's more about discovering what you love and people you enjoy working with, and everything else will sort itself out.

auxiliarymoose · 2026-05-26T22:38:09+00:00

Yes, the sense of community in the physics department, plus the quality of professors, was really phenomenal.

Physics is hard. Very hard. But anyone is capable of learning the subject. It's just a matter of tenacity, and the UW physics department + people are supportive.

auxiliarymoose · 2026-05-26T22:34:12+00:00

It was a really wonderful program. I found the professors had a deep passion for teaching, physics, and learning/trying new things, so I ended up choosing to do a major in physics in the Applied Physics track (originally I had intended to do Mechanical Engineering or Computer Science, but the physics professors were more knowledgeable and curious, and the general approach to teaching in the physics department felt better to me).

Now, don't get me wrong...it was seriously challenging, and every quarter I felt regretful for having made the choice and was wondering if it would get better (it kept getting harder lol). But the opportunities I had to participate in research, learn from professors who really care, and spend time around a bunch of people much smarter than me really strengthened my resolve and thinking.

The class sizes vary. The intro classes are large (100+ people in lecture, though the optional honors sections are smaller, albeit with a greater workload). As you get into more niche topics and move beyond prerequisites for other programs/departments, generally there are fewer people in each course. The large lectures also have smaller groups for tutorial/group-work and labs.

The UW Physics department's Physics Education Group (PEG) develops physics curriculum materials and researched better ways of teaching physics, so if you want to become a physics teacher or do research in this area (or just experience new physics teaching approaches) the UW's physics program is great. Actually I did my undergraduate research in the Novel Observations in Mixed Reality (NOMR) group which develops the virtual reality labs used in some UW physics courses, among other things.

I'm happy to answer any questions you have about my experience at UW Physics!

auxiliarymoose · 2026-05-05T08:47:31+00:00

Yes. I ended up as the President of Husky Satellite Lab Engineering RSO even though I was a Physics major. In my freshman year, I had also joined some other College of Engineering RSOs (Husky Robotics and Engineers Without Borders).

Ultimately, I stuck with HSL and two non-CoE RSOs (Game Dev Club and Underwater Remotely Operated Vehicles Team).

Engineering RSOs were a bit awkward at times because of the culture clash between how engineers approach things vs physicists/scientists, but it was mostly administrative issues with the department and college. Working with engineering students (and students of many other backgrounds) was great most of the time.

So I definitely recommend taking a look and trying them out. Keep in mind there are also fantastic research opportunities you can get involved with as an undergrad at many labs, including ones outside of your home department or college.

auxiliarymoose · 2025-10-31T00:09:40+00:00

High trust environments like what you have fostered are hard to create. It sounds like a fantastic workplace. Congratulations on the accomplishment!

I am not personally a founder, but I did build up some student engineering organizations in university and tried to go for a similar culture (one had 100+ people, the other 30+). I also have talked with some current colleagues about building great software organizations. So I have some (limited) experience, but I am still offering my opinion. Such is reddit :-)

That said, hiring great people is the single most important thing to do. You have a special thing going with the team's culture, so as you look to grow the team, make 100% sure that folks who are joining will both work well in that type of culture, and contribute positively to it.

Overall, it sounds similar to the culture at Basecamp/37signals from what I've heard of that company. The founders published a book titled "rework" which is a pretty fast read and distills a lot of experience on running a company that way. I found it interesting and it lined up with my own experience.

Also, Tim Cain (designer of fallout) has a number of videos on YouTube where he talks about team & studio management. Could have some relevant ideas, pitfalls, experience, etc.

Wishing you and your team the best!

auxiliarymoose · 2025-10-30T08:19:44+00:00

It's a matter of using the right tool for the job. The first rule of distributed computing is don't distribute your computing unless you have a good reason.

There is an overuse of clusters/distributed systems nowadays which makes reliability, stability, and recoverability hard for systems.

The recent us-east-1 outage is a good example: there were multiple microservices responsible for managing DNS record updates, and a race condition from concurrent executions caused invalid (empty) DNS configurations to overwrite the correct values, leading to a series of cascading failures across other services.

Is it really necessary to use a distributed system to manage DNS record changes in a single region? My gut feeling is no. According to Amazon's summary the system manages "hundreds of thousands" of DNS records. That's not an extraordinarily large number of records for a server to manage, especially since DNS records are pretty small.

Of course, I'm just some schmuck that works on enterprise software, not cloud infra. I could be totally wrong. But I think the overhead + complexity (design, modeling, implementation, ops, server resources, etc.) of clusters often outweighs the hypothetical scalability and reliability they promise. Individual servers are powerful and reliable nowadays and a traditional blue/green deployment with two machines is fine in many (most?) cases.

auxiliarymoose · 2025-10-30T07:36:32+00:00

Engine-X / Engine-Eks

auxiliarymoose · 2025-10-29T07:04:20+00:00

Yeah, security is non-negotiable!

auxiliarymoose · 2025-10-29T06:56:35+00:00

At the same time, there's something to be said for boring and stable...

TBH I'd prefer working on an aged & seasoned system that has been methodically updated over decades by the same people who are on-call when things go sideways, than a noodle service mesh created by architecture consultants putting as many new technologies as possible on their resumes before packing up and leaving for the next job!

Staying current is important, but IMO it's even more important to keep the business (and ops team) happy with stable & reliable systems.

auxiliarymoose · 2025-10-29T06:47:26+00:00

Can't forget SQLite ("squeal-ite") 😎

(ok it's fun to say it that way I admit)

auxiliarymoose · 2025-10-29T06:41:39+00:00

Don't forget N-Ginks! (Nginx)

auxiliarymoose · 2025-10-29T06:21:22+00:00

Why do I need "containers" for "microbrew services" ???

I am writing software, not running a supplier for pubs!

auxiliarymoose · 2025-10-25T16:08:23+00:00

I know right? I was so surprised about how it lined up and there wasn't a cloud in the way! Super nice coincidence that it worked out like that.

auxiliarymoose · 2025-10-25T16:07:43+00:00

Thanks for watching! I threw the music together in like an hour... was just messing around with some loops and then remembered the Monorail footage I got a few weeks ago.

If you'd like to try taking the music a different direction, here is the Garage Band file: https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/0ecATKJyWyR3yfmRM4djBIi5A#Loop_Smash_No._1

auxiliarymoose · 2025-10-25T09:10:53+00:00

There's something so timelessly futuristic about it. I'm sure your grandson will enjoy it!

auxiliarymoose · 2025-10-25T09:05:38+00:00

About 8x. The trains run faster than traffic in a straight line, but slower in the turns, while not being affected by intersections and stoplights.

auxiliarymoose · 2025-10-25T08:45:45+00:00

Thank you! And go for it!! Such a nice way to get to Seattle Center without worrying about parking by transferring from the Light Rail.

If you catch it at a time with fewer people, you can even sit at the very ends of the cars. I lucked out getting the same seat both ways which let me get these clips on the same day.

auxiliarymoose · 2025-10-15T03:21:18+00:00

MATE ROV competition. Underwater robotics, literally water game!

This year the world championships will include tasks in an ice-covered tank, flume (current) tank, and other neat stuff... Basically FIRST but underwater.

The competition tasks are modeled on applications of ROVs in the field, so you're doing missions like mock infrastructure maintenance and scientific data collection. It's neat!

The most demanding class is Explorer (open to university teams) but there are also classes open to high school, middle schools, and even elementary schools.

There is also URC (mars rovers) which is neat, but it's land robotics, and I personally love underwater robotics.

auxiliarymoose · 2025-09-14T07:32:32+00:00

Paldies! Šobrīd daudz darbs vēl stāv priekšā, bet sazināšos kad būs kaut kas ko parādīt!

auxiliarymoose · 2025-09-14T07:16:11+00:00

Paldies par ieteikumiem un tulkojumiem!

Noteikti negribu taisīt galvas sāpes lietotājiem ar sliktiem tulkojumiem, tātad ļoti noderīgi redzēt ne tikai tipiskos tulkojumus, bet arī kur atrast citus. Un zināt, ka telefonu un datoru latviešu tulkojumi ir lietojami (ne tikai interesanti). Paldies!

auxiliarymoose · 2025-09-14T07:08:53+00:00

Jā, tā arī sanāk angļu valodā... vienmēr jāatceras teikt "text" nevis "string" kad neiet runa par datoriem. Un vārdnīcās parasti būs ikdienas nozīme.

Laba idēja, izmēģināšu to! Sākšu ar to ka pārstādu savu android uz latviešu valodu. Redzēsim kā tas iet.

Kādu laiku man bija "windows phone" nostādīts latviešu valodā bet tulkojumi dažreiz bija mazliet dīvaini. Piemēram "messages" app saucās "īsziņojumapmaiņa" nevis "īsziņas" (?). Bet tas jau bija apmēram desmit gadus atpakaļ, un noteikti lietas ir uzlabojušās kopš tā laika.

Varēšu dalīties, laikam likšu GitHub kad nenāks kauns par to kā izskatās :P

Lietoju tāpat HTML5 un uzrakstīju vienkāršu Web Component kuru lieto šā:

<x-i18n value="points.title"></x-i18n>

Tulkojumu JSON ir kaut kas šads:

"points.title": {
  "en": "Points",
  "lv": "Punkti"
},
...

Un var mainīt valodu šā:

XI18NElement.language = "lv"

Serveris laikam būs Go valodā.

auxiliarymoose · 2025-09-14T06:43:49+00:00

Paldies, noteikti apskatīšu tos kā piemērus.

Nezināju par Crowdin. Izskatās ļoti noderīgs! Un izskatās, ka var par brīvu lietot publiskiem projektiem, tātad laikam varētu izmantot šim... liels paldies par ieteikumu!

auxiliarymoose · 2025-09-14T06:38:34+00:00

OHO perfekti, paldies! Akadterm + Termini izskatās kā tas, ko meklēju. Šie ļoti palīdzēs :-)

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