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.