I didn’t introduce myself. I figured with 3 minutes I would cut straight to the content.
Demotivating Experience
The most recent demotivational experience I had actually wasn’t related to academia, but I do think it relates to software carpentry. I’ve been working on a project in my spare time for the past 4 years. Specifically, it’s a video game. I spent the first 3 years writing the game’s engine in .net code. I used a library called Mogre (managed wrapper for the popular Ogre 3d library). As I pushed the boundaries of Mogre, I found that I needed features which were available in Ogre but not yet wrapped in Mogre. I decided I would set out to find an automated way to write my own managed wrapper for Ogre. Naturally I stumbled on SWIG which seemed to be everything I ever needed. When I started trying to use SWIG, I spent a lot of time in the user manual. I slowly realized that SWIG wasn’t what I thought it was. After realizing that I would have to write simple interfaces by hand, I was completely demotivated. I thought the entire purpose of SWIG was to automate, but it didn’t seem like that was the case.