Breaking New Ground

Ever have to work on a new technology? Something new to you? Maybe building a gRPC client/server and sending the first gRPC message to it. Or deploying your first service on Spinnaker. Takes a long time, doesn't it? Then you look back and wonder what took so long. You've been writing code for a while. You've sent messages before. You've deployed code. This should be old hat, right? Wrong. 

Think back to high school physics and consider the lowly ice cube. Ignoring altitude, impurities and other non-ideal situations, it takes ~2.1 Joules of energy to raise a gram of ice 1° C. That's not too bad. Take an ice cube out of the freezer and put it on the counter. The water temperature rises steadily, from ~-20°C (depending on your freezer) to 0°C. Then the temperature stops going up. The room is still the same temperature, so you're pouring energy into the ice at the same rate, but the temperature is steady. That's because a state change takes a lot more energy than just heating the water. It takes almost 80x the amount of energy (333.6 J/g) to turn a gram of ice into liquid. The water is still at 0°C. No temperature change, just a state change. So lots of energy was transferred, but as far as the thermometer is concerned, nothing  happened. After that temperature goes up steadily again (~4.2 J/g) until you hit 100°C, at which point it takes a whooping 2256 J/g to turn water into steam. (Side Note: That's why steam burns are so bad. All of that energy is transferred to your skin as soon as the steam condenses)

Doing things the first time is a lot like that. It is *NOT* incremental work. It's a step change. It's a state change. From "never did" to "have done". So you need to put in a lot of "work" to make the change. After that you'll go back to your more normal pace of advancement.

So when you hit that "state change" wall, don't get discouraged. Try some things. Read some books/articles. Ask for help. Once you get over the state change things will be better.