Don't stop believing:.

I can only hope that our generation sees a series finale as good as The Sopranos:.
In other words, Breaking Bad - Mad Men - Game of Thrones - Homeland, please, don't let me down!!:.


Some will win, some will lose,
some were born to sing the blues.

I want to dream:.

Sometimes I wake up at night wondering, what the f**k am I doing here?. I know that my future is not in the academia, so why do I keep pursuing a PhD?. And honestly, I usually have a hard time convincing myself to finish what I started.

And I'm not the only one asking this question. Through my academic experience I've seen people asking themselves this same question, at the beginning, middle and late parts of their PhDs. Usually people decide to continue, just to make worth the time they already spent working towards this objective, though they're convinced that their results will not improve science at all, or if they do, it will be in a minuscular (insignificant) scale. In brief, they just want the (Dr.) title, and I've never been someone looking for titles....

In my case, most of my publications are due to tools I've built to prove points that I think the research community might find interesting, but when they don't, I must start thinking about what I'm doing with my life. Maybe it's time for me to gather up courage and go back to the real software engineering world...

I honestly don't know, but at least today I sent a paper to its final evaluation, hopefully the result will help me decide what I'll be doing with my life next year!!:.

I'm dying. 
Is it blissful? 
It's like a dream.

I won’t come near:.

If there's anything I know is that I've always been, I am, and I'll always be an engineer!. Thus, I know that my mind works by looking for interesting problems and then by trying to solve them. The solutions I come up with might not always be the best or the shiniest, but I'm sure that they can help solve the problem.

And why am I telling this?. Well, for the last years I've been involved in the academic world, and though I usually like it, I must admit that sometimes it's just frustrating!. Let me explain: I usually start by looking for interesting problems, then I look for related work to know what other people have proposed to solve that problem, and then I try to improve on those solutions, naturally, by building a tool that proves my point.

The problem is that it's not that easy to show your humble results to the academic community. Every time you submit a paper describing your results, you must pass the classic test of (at least) three reviewers. You might think that you have interesting results to show, you might even convince a reviewer or two of the importance of your work, but the truth is that most of the times your work will be rejected.

And the worst part is that by reading the proceedings of the conferences where you were rejected, you'll find accepted papers that have the same faults as your humble rejected paper. They may not even make their tools available, so you don't really know if what they're talking about really works or not, but then you look at the authors list (and at the program committee) and you understand why the paper was accepted.

However, I must admit that rejection can be useful sometimes. For example, now I'm preparing a new version of a paper that was previously rejected, and with all the things that we've added so far, I can tell that this time we have a real chance to being accepted...who am I kidding?, the truth is that you never know =)...

Teach me to burn, 
teach me to speak.