madgeardesigns

I carry a half-gallon bottle with me to work 3-4 times a week and finish that almost everyday. Just fill your cup whenever it’s empty and sip-sip-sip. You don’t have to drain the cup in one gulp!

FIU. Jainedra Navlakha. Programming in C++. It was brutal! The entire degree was a great challenge, but this early class in the program was a killer for me. We started coding in C, actually, and I’d heard so many people crying about ‘look out for pointers!’ ‘pointers are complex!’ ‘pointers are dangerous!’ I went in with a fear. I was so dry on the first assignment, paralyzed. I procrastinated. Ended up with an F on it. It’s not like I didn’t know good programming skills from my intro class (Gregg Shaw was an inspirational adjunct professor!). I didn’t apply myself. The pointer fear had me because the first assignment dealt with pointers.

Where I went wrong
I neglected to start small in my code and write a single function, then test. Then expand it and revise it. Then move on to the next function. You know, the whole top-down design thing. I tried to code the whole assignment in one shot! Hunderds of syntax errors! I got it to compile though. Segmentation faults like there was no tomorrow.

Meeting with Navlakha
I decided I would take advantage of the office hours that I didn’t need from Shaw (other than to show-off).
“Professor Navlakha, every time when I run my program I get a segmentation fault. I don’t know what it means. Would you help me debug it?”
“Segmentation fault? Those are often very hard to find. I cannot help you with that.”
Not to make Navlakha sound bad, but basically he told me that I was on my own with that one. I did not (and still do not) hold it against him. Now, thankfully, I’m working in the field of programming. I have still caused segmentation faults, but now I understand what it is and why they occur. At that time I didn’t even know what the phrase meant!

Resolution
Tears? Boys can cry, too! At orientation they’d told us “many of you will change your degree 2 and three times before you graduate. Don’t feel bad about it.”
I decided that I didn’t want to be in that number. The thought didn’t even cross my mind when I hit this ‘wall’ in Navlakha’s class but it would have been the time to make such a change. I decided that I would give it my all to conquer the course.

I must admit, I had deliberately neglected reading the text. And, now I was behind. Since I wasn’t reading I wasn’t learning, so I was behind even in my knowledge. I put down a good cry when I’d realized what I’d allowed my fear to do to me. I took every minute I could from then till the end of the semester and went to the lounge and started copying the text book: “Programming in C++” by Dietel and Dietel. I literally copied all of the chapters that we covered in class, word for word. I worked out the examples with pencil and paper like Shaw taught us and taped that to the corresponding pages. I returned to the pratice of first doing assignments in psuedo-code on paper and debugging on paper before going to the machine. It was lovely! Soon, people were coming to me for assistance on understanding the assignments! Even semesters after that, people were referring the under-classmen to me for instruction!

I still have those pages of notes. My persistence paid off and I EARNED my Computer Science degree from Florida Intenrationl University! My mom reminds me of the sleepless nights. This has been a great point of encouragement for me since then.

I see that someone else wants to learn OpenGL. Yeah. I guess these things go together. I desire to be a game programmer but if I don’t conquer these things I don’t think I have a chance to get into the industry. Perhaps I can get in through tool development.

We will see… but I have to go after the dream!