An Essay written by Nur Iman Khamidy, MSc

The Toughest Goal I Have Accomplished: Learning Matlab and Visual Basic Programming Language
Here is my story started on how I accomplish on learning Matlab and Visual Basic programming
language. For several people, this is the ordinary one, but seriously this will be so challenging if we
only have time about 3 months just for accomplishing on the final project of a lecture course in
developing simulation software, starting from zero understanding on Matlab and VB language until
finishing the final project with A on final mark of this course, what a struggle learning!! The keys are
only one, continuous praying to Allah for energizing and recharging my endurance on extremely hard
learning and keeping my thinking positively to finish it well, really all praise to Allah.
First, I started my learning process from the several notes of algorithms in scratch of papers and
notebooks. I need to sufficiently understand about the development of equations and how these can
be developed on simulation program from several thinking on the algorithms with extensive
discussion with my lecturer for improving the calculation method. This needs almost 1.5 months to
really get in touch with the state of the art of algorithms in simulation, including also understanding
on the implementation of several numerical methods to optimize the calculation of non-linear
equations. I also run the same simulation case on the commercial simulation software on this step,
just for comparing my own simulator to this result. On this period, I got a new habit on before and
while night-sleeping: writing and thinking algorithms and decreasing my sleeping time to be only 5
hours per night, but this is just an initialization.
Next, I went on the learning of the programming language. It took almost a month and should be
thougher than before, but with the help of Allah, I found several ways for letting me easier on
learning. My lecturer recommended the students to use Visual Basic, so I started on learning it from
extensive discussion with him and he also gave us several workshops on writing a code in Visual
Basic. After I discussed with my colleague after 3 days learning on Visual Basic, he recommended me
to use Matlab, he told me several advantages on using Matlab related with the efficiency on writing
the code in Matlab. It has several numerical methods package, including working on solving of
complexe matrices, just on single line of code, instead of more than 20 lines on Visual Basic. More
than agreed with him, I learned it on a month, with the help of Allah, I could decrease my sleeping
time to be only 4 hours per night, and also taking note about several important global code of
Matlab just for my guideline on the final step: writing code, running and debugging the program.
Finally, this is the main part of this essay, prepare yourself on knowing my learning process of writing
code, running and debugging the program just on 2 weeks. With the help of Allah, I began it on tight
scheduling and on-time achievement on each sub-step product (sub-step products are the scratch
code, the improving code and the fixed program), dedicated my sleeping time to be only 6 hours per
week. The scratch code can be finished on 4 days, with the help of Allah, I run it several times and
found the long time running time and sometimes it cannot get the result because of difficult on
getting convergence solution. Then, I improved it on trial and error of several numerical methods for
a week, with the help of Allah, I got a method to tackle these and implemented it, also after that I
tried to change several parameters inside the method just for decreasing the computing time and
increasing the accuracy of result from commercial simulator that I already run it on the first step.
Last 3 days, I had been using it for fixing my program and writing the report. With the help of Allah, I
can finished it on the due-date time, and praise to Allah that I got final mark A on this course.

January 17, 2017