Sometimes we got problems…We are here to handle them!

Sometimes we wish that everything improves linearly related with our studies, no problem appear while we are on it, and at the end we expect a happy successful ending. But this scenario seems not realistic, in reality while you plan something, in parallel life prepares its own plans for you which you need to deal with it.

So don’t lose interest, be ready to deal with the problems that you encounter. In our research with my partner Omar, for a long time we struggled with to have an access to MongoDB. At the time when we would make experiments with the real data we were caught by this problem. We are not able to solve this -cluster specific- problem, however I was not easy with that situation while waiting for it to be repaired. While waiting for an access we passed through several phases. In my writing, I wanted to share the steps that we have followed while overcoming it.

1- Keep calm and recognize the problem.

At the first time, we tried to recognize the problem and find out if it is originating from our side. The issue was there was no response from the database when we made the request. We needed to find whether we can not send the get request to the database or database were not returning a response. To test it, we send a get request to a known website (www.google.com) and observed that request returned an object. After that we made sure that the problem is from our side, but cluster has the issue.

2- Narrow the problem and try possible solutions.

Our mentor’s assistant suggested that maybe we make too much request to the database and therefore it can not handle it. Therefore we reduced the dataset and diminished the business of the requests.

However this did not helped either. We talked with our mentor and he communicated with the person who fixes the technical problems related to cluster. After he contacted with him, he said the connection is working, but after we checked out that at the same day, it was lost again.

3- Get assistance from people who knows the solution

After a few cluster fixes, we were able to access MongoDB.

4- Continue with try and error loop

A few times while we run tests, it failed and the tests remained incomplete. It was very disappointing to have the connection broken again, but I gathered myself up and waited for it to be repaired (Returned to step 3). After some waiting it is fixed again and I continue with the measurements.

5- Success!

At the end I got my measurement results. I would not think that it is that much burdensome. However, it definitely improved my error handling skills. I would not imagine that at the end I would feel accomplished after so much trial and error loop. The feeling of accomplishment comes from not directly achieving the result, but not giving the things up.

I wish this life lesson of us would be helpful when you feel stuck.

Best,

Zeynep