So, this week I found out that for my Capstone Project I’ll be working on ML Breakout. Since this had been my first choice, this was very exciting news for me. I’ve wanted to learn more about both Unity and Machine Learning for a while now, and I felt like taking this project on would give me the push I needed to self-study these topics and gradually apply what I’ve learned. In other words, getting this project would provide me with the focus I needed to learn.
To backtrack a tiny bit, someone that I’ve slowly started to look up to more and more is Elon Musk. He first caught my attention when I read in a magazine article a while ago (I can’t remember which one exactly) that when he was younger, he had a programming job. And at this job, his manager or team lead would come up to him with a task and ask him for an estimate of how long it would take him to complete it. From what I remember, the article said that Elon would tell his manager it would only take about two hours or so, and then he’d stay up all night at the office working on the task, fall asleep at his desk, then wake up the next morning and keep working on the task, and repeat this cycle for a few days until he finished.
For some reason, this was very impressive to me. The sheer amount of focus and drive on display boggled my mind. And the more I heard about him, the more admiration I began to feel. There have been interviews where he’s said that the amount of hours he puts into work some weeks goes over 100, and that he often sleeps at his office.
It’s also a known fact that he’s self-taught in a lot of the subjects that are involved in his businesses (of which there are a mind-boggling amount). And I think that might actually be one of the most admirable parts about him. His focus has allowed him to teach himself how to learn and master new subjects at a dazzling speed, and I think this is one of his major keys to success.
Going into the Capstone Project, I had no prior experience with C#, Unity, Machine Learning, Tensor Flow, or really anything that really related all that much to the project. But I’ve tried to take the Elon route this week and throw myself into learning as much as I can in order to get a better understanding of what it will take to complete this project. I know I’m nowhere even close to Elon Musk, but I’ve found that focus is such an important trait to have when trying to be successful at learning and applying a new framework or anything related to programming (or anything in general).
I’ve also slowly started to realize over the course of going through all of the different classes in this program that focus with self-studying is such a crucial component to being a successful software engineer in general. When I first started studying programming, I thought that just knowing one language would give me all that I needed to get a job, but now, after learning and becoming comfortable with at least six to seven languages and a dozen or so frameworks, that having the knowledge isn’t one of the main requirements to be a good software engineer (although it is a huge one), but knowing how to teach yourself something new and having the focus and drive to keep learning is also very important.
