Hitting a wall

After the distractions from yesterday, this morning I was decided to push myself seriously. I have a video-conference with the Human Resources department in the morning (no, I am not in trouble, I am trying to negotiate an agreement for future home office conditions) and I uploaded to the server a new version of the tool I have been working on this week, so by noon I was done with my day job and ready to work on my PhD. I finished the second week of theoretical courses, covering mostly linear algebra and I felt quite satisfied with my progress, and then I hit a wall.

Photo: U.S. Army Reserve

One might tend to thing that, after twenty years in the job market with success and recognition from most of your peers, you might be less afraid of defeat, but nothing further from the truth. Success is a addictive as many other ways of reward, and once you enter the dynamic of repeatedly beating the odds it is very tempting to start to select you endeavors so that the streak does not snap.

In my case, the proverbial wall was a new programming language: Octave. Over the course of more than 35 years I have evolved across different languages from Basic to Pascal, then on to C++ and finally Python. Being a computer engineer that have been small excursions in other languages but they were little more than academic curiosities or interesting pass times. But now, facing a new programming language that I have to learn (and possibly master) to complete my course I have to admit that I got a bit scared and procrastinated a bit, finding excuses for a significant portion of the afternoon to avoid facing the new programming language. However, in the end I realized that I was just wasting my time and decided to take the challenge. Now Octave is happily installed in my laptop and I can confirm that the first examples are not as scary as they initially seemed. 

Let us see how the rest of the exercises progress. In the meantime, have a nice weekend!