Part XIV — Building a Research Capability
Everything before this part made you a competent quantum engineer. This part makes you a researcher — not by granting permission, but by installing the working habits: reading papers the way scientists do, reproducing results the way engineers do, designing experiments the way experimentalists do, and finding problems the way independent thinkers do. None of this requires a laboratory, a supervisor, or an affiliation. It requires a laptop, discipline, and the standards you are about to acquire. This is also the part of the book most transferable from your software career: you already know code review, testing, and reproducibility culture; here they become research method.