Week 3 Post 3

I am happy to announce that my work on creating a dataset is going great. Today I was able to start working with ROS, as well as learn such concepts as nodes, topics, master, messages, rosout, and roscore. I noticed that when I first started learning those concepts, I could not understand them fully, and it made me feel bad as if I was not doing good enough since it's just basic concepts of the ROS system. However, now I can see what a real struggle for me was. I realized that I didn't understand many concepts in theory before implementing them. I now can say that I am more of a practical person because I only understand the concepts once I apply them to real-world solutions. The same thing happened today. As I was reading the documentation for ROS, I couldn't figure out what all those terms are and how they are connected. But after I started implementing them directly into my project, I was able to understand that nodes are nothing but executables that communicate with each other by publishing and receiving messages while subscribing to topics. I am guessing that this explanation might not make sense to many people, and it is fine because any reader of this post could try my approach and apply the concepts in their projects to see what those terms actually do. I learned that there is nothing wrong with my understanding of the material, and I should not feel bad about not understanding something. By doing so, I set my mind to self-victimization and waste my energy on self-blame. I decided to rather use that energy in more productive ways. By following some tutorials, I found a way to explain to myself what the material is all about and how to use it. This is the kind of mentality I admire in people and want to see in myself as well. So I cannot wait to continue working on the project and learning more concepts and applications.

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