The reset phase
It’s the second week of the reset phase and its not what I expected… Let’s start with the beginnig.
More than a reset I feel like I’m learning a lot of new things and I’m not talking about technical skills but a new way to do things the right way. We had to read… a LOT! I like to read… but only things that interest me. In school there were times where we have to read books about Social Science and to be honest it’s not my favorite topic. But that wasn’t the case here, actually the topic I thought I would be least interested in was one of the most interesting.
Interest!
The first topic “How to talk to anyone”. I’m introvert and I tried to change that… but then CoV19 happened and since then I barely had interacted with someone else. But before that I was doing what the book said, which could be summarized as showing interest and be interesting. I have a few facts that sometimes can draw attention but I don’t usually show it. In the other hand when it comes to meet new people there is a tactic that was very hard to get used to, EYES CONTACT!
Why I’m talking about this topic first? Well, in a near future I’ll have to work with new people, people with a different point of view and there will be moments where I’ll should be able to say “Hey, this is wrong” or “ There are better ways to do it” because as how I’m right now I’m not able to say it, I just care to much about being a nuisance or being left behind. But well, let’s stop here for now, I’ll try to report my progress fron now on.
The road to become a badass developer…
Let’s be honest, everybody wants to be a badass developer, but its not just coding all day and do stuff that works. If you do something by yourself (not necessary related to coding) and you think that what you’re doing is right or “perfect” then you are limiting yourself. “Perfection left no room for improvement” this was a quote I saw somewhere and it left a great impression on me. I have never thought that what I do is perfect but neither I thought it could improve. If it works then is fine, right? Well this may apply for most of the cases but sadly I realiced this too late. When I was in school getting a passing grade was enough, then I meet very passionate teachers that make me want to learn more, but by the time I started looking for someone who could teach me something new there wasn’t anyone with that kind of passion. So I started looking on internet and then faced another problem, I could look at tons of code from different people and then look at mines and say “Doesn’t mine looks better?” or “Why I didn’t think of that approach” what I’m trying to say is how can we say something is “High Quality”? if its from a book? but what if other book say something different? And what if its from the official source? There may be a solution, expose yourself to all and learn from them, pretty obvious right? Something I learned is “Practice makes permanent” if you only do things by yourself then you will only be able to do it your way, if your learn from others then you can expand your vision.
The difficulties along the way
Its not just reading and expect our brain to absorb all that information. We need to be able to understand what are we doing. Not gonna lie, I’ve been there, I was so focused on wanting to read everything useful that I forgot how to learn. A math test? I just memorized the equatios and expect it to makes sense when used. Someway this became a habit, one I didn’t even noticed and I actually sticked to it. I have changed that, it wasn’t easy but in the end I was able to get rid of it.
Another bad practice is the follow example, we may have code something that sort files and works fine but what if we want it to do something else like rename the files, we do it and keeps working then we want it to do something else, then we do it and keeps working and then… see what I’m talking about? We are exceeding the limit of our work, if its a personal project then we can have all the time of the world but if we are doing something for a client then we must be careful to know when to stop, if we do something like guessing what could make the product better without asking about the specifications then we can end doing something that can’t even be used, which is the same that something that is not working.
Baby steps
If we are able to notice what we are doing wrong and be willing to change then we can take our first step and really start a reset phase. We must plan our learning, we are not machines, we can’t be programmed to have an understanding of how things work, if we don’t undestand the base of the things we are learning then we can’t give shape to our thoughts.
