My apology to the Julia community for being weak

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I apologize to the community and everyone who supports me for being so weak and for giving false hope that I could do something. I’m not a really strong programmer.

I was a self-made “genius”, learning things the way others typically don’t, allowing me to complete many things that people struggle with trivially, though this probably doesn’t mean much in the Julia community. However, when faced with real challenges, I relented very early.

I had many projects. There were things I wanted to do. Sometimes I was painfully ignorant of the difficulty. Sometimes it was too big to fit in my head, so it never went past the planning stage and got put on hold.

Many times I feel disappointed for Julia’s lack of adoption. That’s because Julia was, through my analysis, the tool with the best chance at making what I wanted come true, even though with me at this stage, even if the Julia programming language became successful overnight, I wouldn’t be strong enough to leverage it.

I wanted Julia to succeed and wanted to contribute to it with some of my projects. I failed. I could not make it happen.

I wished for Julia to gain widespread adoption easily, wishing for me to be able to take my favorite programming language to work and start my dream easily. Perhaps I should’ve instead wished for myself to be stronger, for me to be able to contribute to Julia and its ecosystem, and everything.

I’m sorry for being weak.

Thank you for supporting me anyway.

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I’m very sorry you feel this way. I don’t know which projects you’re talking about or what drove you to this gloomy conclusion, but I’m pretty sure it overly pessimistic. Even by being here, you contribute to the discussion, and many of your posts have sparked interesting conversations.
Perhaps you have fallen prey to the impostor syndrome. It would be completely understandable. This forum is full of brilliant people who inspire me every day, and sometimes I also feel like I don’t belong. Conversations about compilers or metaprogramming go way over my head… and that’s okay. I can do some things well, others not so well, but we’re all here to learn and lift each other up.
In any case, you don’t need to apologize for “not doing enough”. We don’t owe the community anything. We each give what we can, with the time and energy that we have available. And what you perceive as failures may well be a source of inspiration for some other developer down the road.

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FWIW, I think it sounds like a bit of the opposite. Viewing oneself as a genius can lead to unreasonable expectations that can be very painful when one doesn’t meet up to those self-made expectations.

I think a much healthier approach @Tarny_GG_Channie would be to set more reasonable, smaller scale incremental goals to work on. It’s not bad to have a vision for where all those incremental goals could ideally end up as some glorious success story, but I think it’s best for the most part to stay humble about such things, and just try to do the best you can.

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To clarify, I’m sorry for not reaching my full potential, and if not to anyone else, then to myself. I had planned many projects which never materialized. The latest project I want to do is an ECS library (which is an in-memory database data structure with many allowed operations), for example. I’m not feeling down or anything, but I want to apologize for my mistakes that I did, because I want to become stronger. There were many things I did that I could’ve done better if I were stronger as a person.

I know this is a Julia server, not a self-improvement server, but given that my projects I want to do as self improvement are in Julia, this is at least somewhat related (which I’m sorry by the way if this is not what the community members want, but given my circumstances, I’ve considered the Julia community to be in the best position to help me. I’m feeling like I’m in an implicit contract where I would try to get packages done in exchange for the community helping me improve myself enough to get the packages done.). I’ve been self-improving exponentially since a young age, but currently, I feel stuck. I’ve been working to unblock my potential, for example, I learned that I often mentally inline my code more than I should in understanding code, and I tend to hold the shape of my entire project in memory more than I should, resulting in me being stuck at larger projects. I also don’t really consistently write code for my project, which contributes to the project being stuck and slow. Then, there is the issue of willpower, which I also have plans for. I’m working toward unblocking these so I could reach myself, the person I wanted to be.

It’s particularly difficult because my mind is a result of many metacognitive optimizations, and I did these optimizations since I was a child, and I have no documentation of my optimizations, so it’s akin to a codebase with lost documentation. Moreover, changing these cognitive strategies could be breaking. I’m still working my way to find a cognitive strategy that allows me to take on larger projects.

It’s really difficult for me sometimes, to be hit with some major roadblocks when I don’t have experience with major roadblocks before.

I don’t want to promise anything but I hope after I finished breaking down these barriers, I could put myself on an exponential growth again and churn out good quality packages.

Again, thank you for all the support.

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You did not give me false hope. I don’t expect you to churn out packages. We are not in a contract of any sort. I don’t know how strong of a programmer you are. I don’t know how much potential you have and whether it is more or less than that of other people.

Genius is not enough to achieve big goals. It also takes several other skills and those skills take time and discipline to learn.

By your own account, you seem to struggle with planning projects. The skills to plan projects comes from working on smaller projects and slowly increasing the complexity of projects.

You’re almost always going to work with other people, so if you cannot communicate your ideas to them, you may not be able to achieve a lot. So holding lots of information in one’s memory is a strength. But to be able to communicate it clearly to others is hard. It takes practice in speaking and writing.

It’s hard to live life thinking one is special in good or bad ways. Sometimes people who are driven to achieve big things forget to take care of themselves. We’re here as a community because we think Julia is cool. But in the end, Julia is just a programming language. The world has lots of things going on and lots of things to teach us.

I admire your desire to improve yourself. Good luck. And don’t forget to take care of yourself.

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