Last week, I wrote in my blog post how I'd spent basically the whole week coming to the realization that I needed more support. So, what happened next? After talking to my supervisor, and having my first team meeting, I was able to identify some ways I could provide value to this project. Even still, I spent a lot of this past week being a lot less productive than expected, because I've spent a lot of it figuring out how exactly computers work. Which is ironic, because I think of myself as a computer scientist, but I guess with each project I do the safety guardrails get looser than ever before.

The only way I was able to push through this mess of figuring out questions like 'how do I log in to a server' was by asking wherever I could: google, chatgpt, my coworkers, and my supervisor all received their share of questions. The hard part wasn't asking a question, or following someone's advice: it was hardest to be stuck on a problem with seemingly no route to go. Somewhere during the week, I realized that bashing my head against a wall would be less productive than trying to read around my problem and find an answer that way. And this enabled me to write some logic for how to track where ambulances were stationed in the emergency call simulator.

I was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief last Friday evening when I finally updated the codebase with the new logic, the first time I'd pushed changes to the codebase since getting here. It's not a grand achievement, but it validated the work I've put in over the last two weeks. Along the way, I guess I've come to understand collaboration a bit better this week. It's not just about the time that you spend interacting with other people, and the answers that you share with each other; often, finding ways to get unstuck by yourself is just as important.