Hey there!

I'm really not new here and actually meant to introduce myself to the #new-people for quite some time but as you may or may not already know, that meant to do X is a recurring theme of my being.

The tl;dr here might be: If you think procrastination is laziness, you won't believe the remorse and despair that comes with it. I wrote this to share some of my personal frustrations with myself so that others might get a better understand of what is going on with that quiet dude over there?!. Some of these waters are even deeper but this is as deep as I'm okay with in public at this point.

I entered this space around may 2015, after meeting Paul and Dominic at DTN in Berlin. It was an interesting experience and I really grokked the vibe and spirit of the project back then as I do today. Back then it was still patchwork-classic and much much quieter, to the point where I could easily drain the firehose stream. Today it is different, definitely louder but I still feel the general vibe even though some people I admire left.

To give you some more background of where I'm coming from: I started studying comp-sci and engineering nearly 10 years ago. I was fascinated with computers even as a Child. Games lost their place to website design and server administration for our counter-stike clan which in turn lost its place to programming in python, later C, and always deeper the rabbit hole goes, to the point where I swallowed K&R and Art of Exploitation even before I started studying at the University. Sooo..? you might think: well... I just now completed my bachelor thesis - which is supposed to just take 6 semester, mind you. I fell into quite a dark hole in the beginning, had trouble with anxiety attacks during exams even though I understood and mastered the material and thus accumulated a backlog of failed attempts which I had to chew through slowly. This also forced me into doing part-time work since you only get federal financial support for the regular time, afterwards you are on your own. I know this is laughable compared to student dept in the US but it definitely changed the dynamics of my motivation to complete my degree even more. I had a new exciting job to focus on and studying moved further into the background, priority-wise.

On the other hand, this was also the time that shaped my political perspectives. I got involved in the self-governed Cafe on the campus and made new friends with which I shared a sense of how bent and plain crazy life on this planet has become, societal and ecological. I also got to know @keks. We soon found out our mutual interests in UNIX-like OSes and doing what FB does without a corporate entity which siphons money and intelligence of their users. He also dragged me my first introduced me to the chaos computer club congress 26c3, which was still in berlin at that time and we ported secret-handshake to golang together, making a first working protoype during squatconf.

When I finally came to the point where I finished the required exams and could write the final thesis, I made two bad decisions: I created my own topic which I found interesting but had only vague understanding of (implementing a active noise-cancelling system on an FPGA) and picked a supervisor that did the madscience work but was really bad at guiding. I was left on my own and invested a lot of time into small pieces without ever constructing a bigger picture of how it was all supposed to fit together. The end of that story was, that after around a year of work on all this (technically the deadline for these is 9 weeks but it is common at this uni to do all the preparation/coding/experiments/measurements beforehand and register your thesis and do the writing once you have your results) my supervisor said oh btw, my contract here ends in a month and the professor is going into retirement. So you either finish your thesis by then or find a new institute that likes to adopt your topic. I was no where near completion at that point, not even started to document anything and still in the phase of making proof-of-concept-ish modules. Additionally: Even though it is an univeristy of technology, the comp-sci department is a niche there and signal processing done in an esoteric hardware description language was not something that other institutes were interested in. So I gave up and stopped working on it - I didn't even extracted and document the high precision filters I designed, which surely could be used for other stuff.

snip part1 - 8k limit

After quite a long remorse binge, I mustered up to find a new topic and supervisor. This time I picked someone I was personally friends with, who gave me a topic that was relevant for this work, namely mobile push messaging. So he tasked me to analyse googles and apples systems, which I did quickly, documenting how these message brokering systems are setup from the perspective of the consumer and service operators and implemented a tool to intercept the communication between device and broker cloud for Android, after testing an already existing tool for iOS.
So the technical part of this was actually done in time, on the documentation side of things it was pretty bleak though. The outline for the thesis was not just documenting the process but also putting their design decisions into the context of privacy concerns, like that facebook leak(ed - might have changed by now) the Message from X to your push provider.

I also need to add a side-note about the Bologna reform, which changed all courses in Europe to bachelor/master. The courses became much more school-like. The focus is on getting you ready for a paid job, not academia. Writing scientific papers was an optional subject and the exams are just solving (numerical) problems which are easy to grade and correct. The size of the courses also left little room for presentations.

So I ran into the knife of having to write my first scientific work as my final exam. This together with the sociological aspects of the topic really pushed me back into the dark corner of being unable to work at it, feeling unable to ever finish it and maybe some kind of imposter syndrome as well. Time went on and on and the more time passed the more I felt like none of this was new or contributing anything, even though that is not the aim for a bachelor thesis.
Additionally, the choice of picking someone I could trust that would understand my personal problems involved in the process bit me again but now into the other direction. Since we were close friends he was unable to play the disciplinary role with me and so I dwindled on my own again. I took nearly another year before the despair grew to a level where I couldn't take treading water any more. This time I kept the topic though and switched to a supervisor that knew me and the previous supervisor well enough and was comfortable with playing the harsher cards and working with me to construct a framing for the project where I wouldn't go into deep-dive mode and pick up other stuff when it became tough and yea..

In winter of 2016 I was in the lucky position to get to know @katze, @luroc and I convinced them to build a first prototype of #talenet based on SSB for thereisnogame at 33c3. The whole thing was really omega-project-like and the prototype halted and caught fire but we later applied for a grant to work on it with a serious time/energy investment. See the https://t4l3.net/concept/ for more if you haven't heard about it. Of course this was another distraction because I was uncomfortable with how my thesis was going. On the other hand I needed money and even it felt startup-like with regards to how it drained us it gave me more flexibility that a job at a bar or supermarket.

The time frame for the grant was half a year and afterwards I finally began to work on writing my thesis and it actually finally worked. My supervisor also encouraged me right from the beginning to seek counselling to work on my anxiety attacks and disassociative tendencies. I was kicking and screaming at first but now I just wonder why I didn't do it sooner. It helped me a lot to understand myself better and even though it's still a long journey which involves old griefs and digging up some buried bones, I'm actually looking forward to the valley beyond. Now I'm having my final exam in about three weeks for my last two ECTS points which are missing to get the degree and than I'm reallt done with it, which sounds unbelivable after all that time... I don't think I will apply for a master course anytime soon. I just don't see myself as a student anymore at this point. Too much bad experiences to get back into that mode right away. If at all, at another univeristy AND after some time passed to work through it.

I'm still in despair about all the time it took me even though I learned a lot, personal and technical. Life went on and didn't wait for me. My parents are in quite a bit of financial trouble and I'm working with my Dad on a new project to dig them out again. This has been going on for nearly a year now and side-lined my work on tale:net and the thesis, which didn't make any of the three easier... A wish for my future would be better time organization and being able to work on just one thing at a time, not having the constant feeling of not living up to my own expectations.

thank you, @elavoie for you encouraging words!

re don't beat yourself. Yes, I know I shouldn't but these brain-loops are quite slipery and while I guess that you know this as well, don't think about pink elefants will lead to an image of an pink animal with large ears and nose in most peoples heads. Applied to stressful situations this can be really toxic and staying positive and focusing on your abilities is key. I'm starting to understand that I got this is much more powerful than don't touch any of these 25 buttons or everything will blow up.

re keep us in the loop: I'm trying to reach out more but still have issues with opening up. I went though most of my life by solving problems with myself first and only go to friends and family with them once I solved them. I didn't want them to feel misarble or bother them, not realizing that they can feel how down I am...

but yes, like you said: One small doable step at a time. :)

@kik your description resonates quite well with a lot of my experiences. The hackish attempts from yesterday evening to just get replication back working had a lot of hidden dependencies and ignoring them and plowing through left a sour taste together with a still not working state of that branch.

I wonder if there is a good formulation of this process. I guess it's also part of getting things done. The few times I approach it felt like buying a new house where I just wanted to replace a broken window but maybe I need to dig in a little more to let the transformation do it's trick....

Thanks for sharing so openly @cryptix.

And good luck with your final exam, you truly are a fighter :)

which in turn became "agile methodology" when we realized it was not just about programming.

okay, sure. I can relate to that coming from the software side of things myself.

I guess I'm just not being honest with myself when it comes to time for obnoxious chores and missing practice about cutting them down to managable pieces. My TODO list would probably read 1. do taxes\nEOF instead of actually elaborating of what involved in that.

I'm also wondering if it would help me to throw a tool at this or if rigid practice with pen and paper would help more.. shiny new tools are always too tempting.