Research Subjects Expand Naturally on Their Own

John Washbrook, who was himself a senior academic in the department, took me under his wing and he told me something that very important. He said, "Just start something, no matter how humble." This is not recall; about programming, this is about research. But no matter how humble and unoriginal and unimportant it may seem, start something and write a paper ab about it So that's what I did. it turned out to be a very significant piece of advice.

I've told that to every research student I've ever had since. Because it's how you get started. Once you start the mill turning then computer science is very fractal—almost everything turns out to be interesting, because the subject grows ahead of you. It's not like a fixed thing that's there that you've got to discover. It just expands.

Simon Peyton Jones tells research students to just start researching, and the subject will extend out before you for exploration naturally.