Well, it’s been quite long since I actually wrote a blog post. A lot has happened since then, and I don’t think it’s easy to summarize everything in one post. But I’ll talk about how I remembered my blog and decided to revive it.
I’ve been trying to manage my time better over the past few months, let’s say since the beginning of summer. I went home for my sister’s exams and then came back to college. I was working on the capstone project, where I was trying to implement the capstone processor. The initial days went quite smoothly: I learnt the intricacies of processor design and the capstone architecture, which is a security-focused processor. But as time went on, I got caught up in debugging. Looking back, most of it was due to poor debugging practices and a lack of patience. Every single day I tried to “make it work,” twisting and forcing my way through. And as I got lost in this rathole, I became addicted to being in the lab, thinking about it all the time. To the outside world it may have looked like hard work or passion, but in reality it was just obsession with seeing the end — which is not the reason one should be doing things.
Several times I thought of coming back here and writing, but the barrier felt too high. In the process I completely lost track of time, the habit of reading, writing, and other things. And, as usual, it eventually led to burnout. So I took a week-long break to visit my friends and grandparents. While I was there, I was still stressed about an upcoming deadline — one I had completely postponed because of the debugging obsession.
Naturally, when I came back, we decided it was best to leave the debugging aside for a few days and focus on the deadline. So the original 6 weeks allotted for it had to be squeezed into the remaining 3 weeks. I was very stressed — so much so that when my mom and sister came to visit me for 2 days, I couldn’t enjoy it properly and probably didn’t give them the time and send-off they deserved. But there were a few improvements in my way of working: this time I started writing things down, either before implementing them or as I implemented them. That helped initially, but soon it got out of hand and I was back in the same situation: spending double the time debugging compared to writing the code. Eventually, I realized the silly mistakes I had been making. To fix them, I wrote the problem and the algorithm on paper, implemented the algorithm cleanly, and diffed it with my buggy code to spot the issue. That systematic fix took just 2 hours one morning — but I had been chasing it for over a week.
In the end, my colleague actually found the last bug in the capstone code — a one-liner mistake. It was satisfying, but also frustrating that so much time had been wasted on something so trivial.
We somehow met the deadline — barely — working till the last day for the revision deadline. As anyone can agree, that was pathetic management. But apart from the lessons I learnt, it also made me seriously think about my PhD and what I want to do. The “why” probably deserves a post of its own, but I’ll try to summarize: however unorganized my management was, I still don’t think I’m the worst out there. That means some of my troubles with debugging and management must be common to others too. Maybe not all, but surely people waste time debugging.
So I thought: why not make my PhD about this? I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I’ve done a lot of things purely for my own entertainment and pleasure. Most of us do. But wouldn’t it be great if, in all that “entertainment,” I could also create something usable for others? I know I’m not going to cure cancer, but I believe I can be the toolsmith — someone who makes tools that help others do their work better. And since I always use my own tools first, I can build them in areas I enjoy, like hardware design or programming.
I’ve been trying to align my routine to this goal, but not everything has gone as planned. Last week I fell sick. Not “viral sick,” but in a strange way: I felt short of breath, and I became scared of swallowing food. This is something that’s hard to explain, but there’s a phobia called phagophobia. I don’t know how it started, but I’m trying to get over it. Recently I realized it might have to do with my unhealthy routine — too little sleep, too much coffee, drinking coffee instead of water. Let’s see how the fix goes.
Coming back to my PhD direction: I know this is a vague argument, but I believe it has some merit. If problems are generalized enough, then solving them becomes research. Generalization, though, is something I’m not very good at. I tend to think of solutions to specific problems, but not solutions that solve the problem and a whole category of related problems. That’s something I only realized last night — that I’m not a very systematic thinker. I often come up with garbage solutions to poorly defined problems, iterate a dozen times, and think each one is a masterpiece… until I realize it’s not. I won’t stop, of course, but I know this needs work. To outsiders, it might look like I come up with half-baked ideas and don’t think deeply enough. That was never my intention, but there’s no defense either.
So I decided to read The Art of Reasoning by David Kelley. I’ve just started, but already it feels like it addresses my exact problem: not being able to specify problems clearly. I’ll need to practice what I learn from it. Hopefully this blog can stay revived as a place to do that.
Signing off,
Aditya Ranjan Jha