What is the price of achieving expertise in any field? 10000 hours.

3 minute read

The 10,000-hour rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, suggests it takes 10,000 hours of focused practice to master a complex skill. I found this very interesting in my learning journey from circuit design to inverter control.

Started building circuit, firmware development and PCB design for small hobby project since 2013. I literally sucked at the beginning. Never felt that I am good at any of these things. I still remember, spending whole day to figure out that I cannot run a for loop up to last index while trying to read an array of IR sensors. LOL. Fast forward, It was 2016, I felt that now I am good at circuit design and circuit prototyping.

Until that point, I never have the confidence to feel that I am good programmer. I used to say people, I am a bad at programmer. I am afraid of programming. After my graduation in 2017, I started learning firmware development seriously. Actually, I have no other options. I had to build firmware for few products for bread and butter. At That time joined an agro-tech farm. Developed low power bio sensor for cattle, IoT environment monitor system. During 2020, I felt the confidence that I am good at firmware development and programming. It took me years to feel the confidence in programming, may be more than 10000 hours. At that point, I was able to build firmware for cross platform, cross compiler, cross microcontroller, modular and maintainable code.

Similarly, I was building PCB for many years, designed hundred of PCBs. But every time, I had to start from scratch. It took 1 to 3 days to build the schematic and another few days to build the PCBs. At one point, I found that most of the time, I was reusing the same sub circuit. Then I started building all of the sub circuit in a library with my fellow teammates. One day when I need a new PCB for new circuit, it took me Literally one hour to assemble the schematic. I still have that library in GitHub as open source.

I started working on inverter control in and model development in Simulink since April 2022. It was system level study of 9GW wind farm. I really struggle a lot, understanding the model within short time, running test cases, running such model Opal-RT in was a such a challenge. It took 2/3 hours sometimes to just compile the model in Opal-RT. It was a such an exam of patience. Fast forward, after in this 2024, I feel that now I am good at building inverter model, I understand few of the physics behind control, able to build unified model for hardware code generation and offline simulation. The initial struggle taught me many things. Also thanks to EPRI and my professors for shaping this journey.

Then you might be wondering what I am struggle now? Yes, I do have struggle now with my Research Job. I always feel that I am not good at mathematical modeling. May be I have to wait another 10,000 hours for that.

About Me

Hi, I’m Shuvangkar Das, a power systems researcher with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson University. I work at the intersection of power electronics, DER, IBR, and AI — building greener, smarter, and more stable grids. Currently, I’m a Research Scientist at EPRI (though everything I share here reflects my personal experience, not my employer’s views).

Over the years, I’ve worked on real-world projects involving large scale EMT simulation and firmware development for grid-forming and grid following inverter and reinforcement learning (RL). I also publish technical content and share hands-on insights with the goal of making complex ideas accessible to engineers and researchers.

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