25
Aug
A message of hope
At nearly a quarter of a century years old, I thought that I had finally gotten the rhythm of the world, and how to tick.
The events that unfolded these few months proved not only the unpredictability of this world, but also the extent of my naivety.
For the past 3 years of my polytechnic education, I’ve realised that many problems can be solved, especially since every single piece of possible dirt on any programming language can be found on the wonderful resource that’s commonly known as THE Internet. It’s the go-to tool to dig up documentation, code samples, and lots of discussion about programming.
It’s also my go-to tool whenever I got stuck during my own coding sessions. It all operates on a very simple, and elegant premise: the programming problem you’re stuck at has an extremely high probability of having been encountered and solved by countless predecessors before you. By combing discussion forum sites, or posting threads asking for help, most programming problems are very easily resolved.
It’s with this powerful and empowering mindset that I set out, and managed to re-write functions to print documents in Java when there are existing application programming interfaces that already do this. It was also with this same sheer brute-force that I came up with the algorithm for a movable carousel of CDs within a desktop application.
Then in the second semester of year 2, something drastic happened. I was being told that programming is a very tedious job, and that I shouldn’t like it. It probably has something to do with actually putting faith in that belief, but shortly after that, I started to lose steam on my assignments.
I’ll be the first to admit, it’s 100% my fault for actually allowing myself to be influenced so easily towards the negative; it’s still amazing that the episodics had a profound effect on my self-esteem. This is a lesson for me to be more inquisitive and careful in accepting what people want me to think.
I’ve never actually spoken to the person about this, because I have realised that it’s my own prerogative to be fully rooted and grounded in my beliefs. Being too easily receptive to another person’s opinion on how I should feel was my mistake, and it’s one that I’m still trying to sort out up until now. I neither blame the person, nor do I wish to out him/her at all.
You might be wondering who I’m referring to. Just be assured that it’s not you. I’ve been careful enough not to have that person on my MSN messenger or FaceBook, so he/she would not know that I’m talking about him/her. Got to be careful about social networking!
As I start anew on this final year project, I hope to find my previous mojo back. And this time, I’ll have my brain filtering software working at full capacity.