Returned home after a very long day at work. I mean everyone spends the same amount of time working; but when you suck at something with finesse, it feels like eternity.
Day 1 with my supervisor was excitingly special. I felt so good and motivated. One week after, here I am writing another blog criticizing my self. I’m so bad at programming. I mean it feels great to code after many years of apparent dormancy. Dormancy in terms of studying something completely unrelated to what I really wanted to do. But now that I am doing theory (theoretical polymer physics), I have to code. But can I?
The answer is yeah – kind of. Well I know the syntax for C/C++, I’m very familiar with Linux environment and Vim – I know stuff. And even if I can’t remember the whole thing, there are websites which I can refer to, right? Because it’s not an exam – it’s just referring to stuff you don’t know to make progress with your research. So this should give anyone an impression that I’m * great at coding. Well, NO.
I lack this vital ingredient called programming logic. I can’t think from the perspective of a computer. I can draw some boxes and say “the pointer is there and it goes there”, and all that when I look at some code. That’s something very basic. Worse is when I start to write my own code – I struggle so * bad that people around me lose all their patience. The only thing that’s keeping me focussed is the attitude of my supervisor towards this problem. He doesn’t push me, he doesn’t shout at me, and is always available to discuss the logic – but then I screw up again and go back to him. This is something I love doing – but I’ve been doing this for the past one week to understand and modify a 300 line code, and this is making me go nuts. Along with this there is a seemingly inferiority complex problem – I don’t want anyone to look at my code except my supervisor. I have lots of people in my lab who are great at coding, but I almost never go to them. I could still go and ask them – but I won’t. So that’s that.
I hope I stay calm and “work on it, even if it takes time – this is how one learns” – quoting the words of my supervisor.
