The Swamp of Despair

One of my goals during my project on sound in Miami was to learn to visualize interactive graphs with the D3 library in Javascript. I wasn't an expert in JS, but I was familiar with the language and could use it to build rudimentary front-end design projects. I had the same level of familiarity with HTML and CSS. In general, I have a solid understanding of back-end design and scripting languages like Python and R.

While I was collecting data for the project, I was also learning the basics of D3. I was following tutorials on youtube, creating some simple graphs and learning to stylize them solely through D3. But then, when it came to applying it to my own project, I hit a roadblock. My graphs were not rendering properly, maybe because of the format of my data, and I was struggling to understand how to properly layout multiple elements on my page.

I didn't think much of it the roadblock at first. I can power through it. I spent countless hours late into the night combing through documentation, watching videos, inspecting the source code of pages to try to understand the problem. But nothing seemed to work. I felt stuck. Progress on my project came to a screeching halt. And the deadline began to creep closer. I was stuck in the Swamp of Despair.

It was easy to get caught up in the anxiety and negative feelings associated with the coming deadline. I legitimately felt despair and every day that passed without advancing added to that despair.

For a moment, I really felt like I was not going to be able to push out a visualization by the deadline. But thankfully, I have great mentorship and colleagues to lean on.

My professor, Alberto Cairo, helped settle my nerves. He first reassured that not only is it not failure to find yourself in this pit, but that it is completely normal. My colleagues were also supportive and gave examples of things they struggled with in their own projects that caused them despair. Dr. Cairo also gave me great advice, which was to move on and work on the parts of the project that I can actually finish at the moment. While I was still feeling frustrated with D3, the gears in my brain almost immediately shifted. New ideas started to pop into my head and I could practically see the visualizations themselves. I could finally get some meaningful progress. I was out of the swamp.