I am working on some complex code with the spacecraft. It is hot n heavy, C++, Object Oriented, and may soon contain some ray trace coding in it. Very scary stuff. Most of this has to do with the earth warming our radiators. What? The spacecraft has radiators? Why yes! Just like a car, the spacecraft needs to move the heat of the instruments out to space. Unfortunately, sometimes the earth shines on the radiator and warms us up. To make things more complicated, this nice happy radiator which looks out into space is also surrounded by two shades. One blocks the sun, the other blocks the heat of the spacecraft. The inside surfaces are coated with a highly reflective material to reflect the heat of the radiator right out into space. Bye bye heat. But of course, reflections work both ways and if the Earth happens to illuminate the surface of the reflector, heh, it reflects the heat from the Earth ONTO the radiator, and in effect, warms our instrument.

This has led to some heavy duty programming on my part which I am still not comfortable with doing. Not the C++ or the OO code. Hell, I have a pretty certificate from Harvard University Extention School saying I am a certified software engineer! No, it is the ray trace stuff. This is tough crap. It scares me a bit. I get nervous about my abilities and then I am confused as to what I should be doing and if I am doing the right thing. One of the other people on the project heard of my code and ran right away to write up the ray trace stuff in a scripting language. I would rather put this directly into my code, but I am still deciding how this will work and behave.

This always traces back to my insecurities. I started my professional life with a Master’s Degree of Science (Astronomy/Planetary Sciences). I then worked as a data jockey for a year and then moved to software (scripts) and was encouraged to get above certificate. It took me 4 years to take all of the classes in addition to working, but I did get the certificate. So I moved from scripting to software engineering. I have always been very nervous of others looking into my codes and I am terrified by someone saying "Hey! Look at this stupid move". I wish I had a stronger shell. I know that when I take critism seriously, it can break me. I need to allow some of this to relfect off of me and into space. Let go what I think people are saying about ME.

And just BE.