tags [Programming, learning]

When I look back at the last 4 years of my engineering life, I feel I haven't done anything worthwhile. Compared to the amount of learning I did in my pre -college years, the last 4 years look like nothing. I did a lot of things in these four years, but I cannot claim to be an expert in any of them. During my school days, I was really good at what I learnt, maybe the best among my peers. One might argue that the feeling you have is, because you have the most competitive and talented peers . But that's not true. There was something that changed after clearing JEE and that was trying to run before you walk.

I always want to see the whole picture before learning something, i.e. what do I get to do after I learn these stuff. In school education, you always know what you are going to do with the things you learnt, but it is not the case with college education. The first two years of my undergraduate studies, was spent doing courses like Networks and systems, Digital systems, Analog circuits, Control systems etc. Nobody gave me an idea on where these things are going to be used during these period. Even though it was interesting, I felt the pace of these courses was slow. I was asked to calculate the Fourier transforms of infinitely many functions just for the sake of it. I didn't know where these functions are going to be used. So I started spending time on other things. One of them that got me interested is programming. You could see the output immediately and there were examples of huge systems built with the things that I was learning. But two years of clearing the courses with very little effort had made me cocky and overconfident. I had lost the patience to go through something with care. I wanted to become an awesome programmer as quickly as possible. I wanted to create GUI's, so I started learning Java.(Then I felt it was the thing that we can make GUI's with.). But again I was impatient. I started learning the language and I went through the initial part really very fast and lost my interest after I started encountering some things which were dependent on the fundamentals.

I never realized the basic mistake I was making. Thinking that I knew Java pretty well, I started experimenting with android development. I built some good apps by googling things and figuring out, but never ever tried to learn the basics. I was just trying to run. When you make an extreme effort to run, you will fall at a distance from your starting point, which gives you the illusion that you made some progress, but actually you are at the same point.

In the summer of my fourth year, I put some effort and got into Google summer of code. It was a stroke of luck i.e. my programming capabilities were still bad. I think my organisation decided to go with me because of the amount of effort that I put in getting my application done. This was a large project and I think this is the place where I learnt most of the things I know today. I learnt to write decently good code, learnt on how to communicate via email, and other things. This is one place where I learnt things from scratch and started experimenting.

People think that I know things really well, but thats not true. People say that I am going through the [Imposter's syndrome]{www.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome}, but I am not. I am still an awful programmer who knows things because he reads a lot of [Hacker News]{www.news.ycombinator.com}.

This has to change. I have to start to relearn things. One thing that GSoC taught me is that it is really necessary to spend some time before you become good at it. You need to walk before you run. Maybe its too late, but there is only one path that I can take, that is to relearn things and not go with the flow.

Bharath M R

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