There are extra special days in software development. Most of the time, it's boring, soul-crushing work, which is really no different from any other job, so that's not the kind of day I'm talking about. Then there are days when you've worked really hard to find a solution to a problem that another developer looks at for 5 minutes, comments out your code, writes one line of code in the base language that does what your 30 lines of code did. That's not the kind of day I'm talking about either.
I'm referring to one of those days when you realize you've been talking to people for three weeks, you've written almost no code at all, and you start to wonder if your entire team, and not a small team to say the least of its size, could be replaced by single developer and a couple well intentioned SMEs. No seriously. I understand that building a quality application that is well suited to the needs of the business takes a lot of talking and whiteboarding and prototyping and throwing away of code. It just feels overwhelming how so little can get done while so much is going on.
I guess that kind of explains why I'm so eager to study machine learning and even try to pick up some Mandarin. I want to feel like I'm accomplishing something. On the machine learning front, I flew through week 1 with very few problems. Even in week 2, the material seems pretty easy to get the hang of, but the tutorial on Octave was drudgery, and the quiz is killing me. That's a problem too because the programming assignments have to be done in Octave. I need to pass that quiz and get a victory under my belt before the rest of this week ends, and I'm left with no motivation to finish the assignments.
I'm referring to one of those days when you realize you've been talking to people for three weeks, you've written almost no code at all, and you start to wonder if your entire team, and not a small team to say the least of its size, could be replaced by single developer and a couple well intentioned SMEs. No seriously. I understand that building a quality application that is well suited to the needs of the business takes a lot of talking and whiteboarding and prototyping and throwing away of code. It just feels overwhelming how so little can get done while so much is going on.
I guess that kind of explains why I'm so eager to study machine learning and even try to pick up some Mandarin. I want to feel like I'm accomplishing something. On the machine learning front, I flew through week 1 with very few problems. Even in week 2, the material seems pretty easy to get the hang of, but the tutorial on Octave was drudgery, and the quiz is killing me. That's a problem too because the programming assignments have to be done in Octave. I need to pass that quiz and get a victory under my belt before the rest of this week ends, and I'm left with no motivation to finish the assignments.
