The Matrix : Revelations

Those who have watched the first movie in the Matrix Trilogy should remember the part where Neo is given the choice between the blue pill and the red pill. If he takes the blue pill, he will wake up at home living as normal, believing what he wants to believe. If he takes the red pill, he will be on a one way ticket journey to reality outside the Matrix. It's kindda like the situation I'm in now, well rather the situation that i WAS in.

The reason I came here to Germany on this internship was to discover the truth whether, given a better working/learning environment in software development, would I come to like the field better? Would the question "do i want to work in the field for the rest of my life?" be answered or not and what would be the answer? Yes or no? Basically coming here is analogical to taking the red pill.......and like the Matrix movie, there is no turning back.

Yes, how painful reality is especially when it doesn't go your way. To begin with, I didn't really have much experience in software development in real life let alone software development in a team. That was one thing i was curious about. I haven't done any software development in a team and i was pretty blank about it. How do we work in a team when it comes to software development. How is this guy supposed to know what the other guy is doing? Surely there will be a conflict of data structure, variable types, class names etc. The list of what could go wrong goes on and on. To make things worse my basics of programming, specifically object oriented programming was not strong and i have forgotten a lot of things. I remember in the lectures, i was wondering what is the relevance of learning all this theory stuff such as classes, functions, subroutines, friend, public, private, arrays etc. I wasn't a programming geek back in Uni, and it seems that the other trainees im working with were somewhat "geekier" than me. But the German team leader is a cool geek, i mean at first glimpse he doesn't look like a geek because he's quite stylish. But when i started working with him, the complexity of his knowledge was show through the way he talked. I couldn't even understand what he, and my colleagues were talking about. This was attributed to my week basics. And the lack of good English among our team members was not helping. So we had to change the communication language to Visual Basic and ASP.Net....pseudo code is also acceptable and understandable. Diagrams are highly recommended too.

But i kindda got away with it since i was quite a fast learner and the basics were not so hard to learn. Just act like u know everything and quietly n quickly learn from the internet. Learning from other peoples mistakes is also a good way to learn. Haha. But when i comes to a high level of programming, ill get pretty much blur. Thats when i start to think "what the heck have i got myself into this time?". This is when i really feel bad for getting into trouble in a field that i don't fancy much. Actually, i feel bad looking at my other team mates working with full interest because this is what they enjoy doing, and compared to them, i look really uninterested and starting to become a liability. The others are expecting me to have the same if not higher level of interest in the field because, why else would i go half way across the world for this traineeship? complaining about it wouldn't make anything better would it? Well, like it or not i have to go through it. If not for myself, for my fellow team mates. I don't want to let them down. I always like to get myself into trouble, but i always manage to get myself out of it...I just have to hang on for 1 more month. Hopefully all goes well...

However I don't regret taking the red pill. I think if i took the blue pill i would be forever in a condition of perpetual { if...elseif...} missing the {end if } statement. Or in layman terms i will always be wondering what if i took the red pill, would my life be better or worse? I also don't regret studying computer science and it think it will be extremely useful in what ever plans i will undertake in the future. But the fact remains once you know what you want and what you don't want, life wont be the same, trust me on this one.

My advice to those still studying especially in UTM, please, please equip yourself with extra skills other than what your studying. Degree ++ is a good way to get value added skills. For example, I took the "Environmental Journalism" Degree++ course that was conducted by Karam Singh Walia from TV3. Actually it was there and then I found out i had a big interest in Journalism. i am really glad that i joined that degree++ course. If i had known about the degree++ program earlier, i would take a lot more of their courses to equip myself with value added skills. Who ever came up with the Degree++ program is a genius! I'm sure it was an academician that came up with this idea because no Malaysian politician would come up with an idea this brilliant....and that guy really knows the value of "added value". It is important that one acquires these extra skills because its these skills that will give one more options on where one wants to work in the future. Some of my friends told me that after a few years in the IT field, they start to hate working in that field, but because it was their only skill, they had to do it whether they like it or not. I guess freedom of choice is not free. It costs knowledge and skills... also determination as a service charge.

So, there u have it. My Matrix story... Now, what is your Matrix story?