No, I Will Not Do Your Homework

Roughly once a week, I get an email from someone in India, Thailand, China, or some other far-flung corner of the world who is fervently working on their final undergraduate project, their master’s thesis, or some other coursework and wants me to help them. Don’t get me wrong, I like helping people wherever possible, providing their intentions are honest, and they’ve done their homework. I adopt the same attitude exhibited by physics professors at my undergraduate university – if you could explain what you’d done, where you were stuck, and propose possible solutions, they’d help you out. If you were fishing for free homework answers, you were SOL.

The kind of people that are asking for help clearly haven’t done their homework. They ask me for help on peer-to-peer networking projects, example code, and even exact programs that will essentially comprise their entire project. No dice. I wrote a book on the subject, and I gave it away for free (although, yes, it is out of date at this point).

Neither life nor Google are going to hand you a complete answer, polished and ready to hand into your professor. You’re going to have to learn to figure things out for yourself. Sorry, but this is tough love.