Week 9: November 2nd to November 8th

What I Did This Week:

- Made some progress in refactoring talkeditor.py. In particular, made the save prompt a separate file, and looked at alternatives on how to add functionality.

What I Plan to Do Next Week:

- Decide on one way to add functionality to the new save prompt. If it works, then get back to writing tests.

Problems:

- Every time I think I understand Qt, it throws another curveball at me.
- To quote my project proposal: "I have a slight predisposition toward depression and anxiety, which might lead me to procrastinate." It got pretty bad over the last few weeks, and assignments and midterms didn't help. However, I have gotten some work done, and I suspect that the worst is over (I am still taking medication, and I have recently taken steps to make sleep and nutrition a high priority for myself).

Discussion:

When I was in high school, and in the first couple years of university, all the students in the STEM fields had a common frame of reference. We had all taken mostly the same courses, so our skills were pretty interchangeable. But the deeper we get into our education, the more we diverge in what our vocabulary consists of, and the more I find that I have to eliminate certain interests.

For example, I figured out a while ago that I'm probably never going to be an expert physicist. I am okay with that -- in fact, somewhat paradoxically, I can enjoy reading about physics more now that I don't feel the pressure to become an expert in it.

I am starting to think that I'm approaching the same wall when it comes to programming. Maybe not all kinds of programming -- I like solving deep, mathematically interesting problems. I saw a discussion in IRC lamenting how people who don't learn to code in class will end up being mediocre programmers. I have learned to code, and I write a lot of code in my spare time. I've solved a bunch of the Project Euler problems, and I write programs to find the answers to questions I think are interesting, or to solve problems I need to solve. The problem is, most of these problems are mathematical in nature. In a way this is good, because I have gotten a fairly deep and intuitive understanding of algorithms.

But it's bad because it means that I haven't cultivated the breadth of skills that other computer science majors seem to have -- it wasn't until this semester that I figured out how to use Git and SQL -- heck, I didn't even know how to use IRC before this semester, and I'm learning things about Linux every day that it seems like my colleagues have known their whole lives. (I even had trouble figuring out how to format some of the text in this blog post -- I just can't seem to get anything right this week.)

I wish I had a lighter note to end on, but I don't think this is necessarily as bleak for me as it sounds. I know I can survive this course.