I think during this week I just kind of sailed through, well, life, the assignments, the lectures, videos and such; not really paying that much attention to what I was doing. it is only when I started compiling my notes and reflecting on all of the things, I did during the week that I think I started connecting the dots of the theme of this week.

First off, we got a little bit of a taste programming wise by doing an exercise in HackerRank involving stacks and queues, as well as a general overview of the Linux shell and bash from and MIT course. While this was pretty basic, I still was able to gather some new knowledge, mainly regarding scope in OOP and a couple of interesting commands for parsing text and checking the status of the computer using the shell. On my side I also learned a bit about Jekyll in order to make this very blog youy are reading right now (hope to make it a bit more beautiful as the weeks pass on).

Secondly, as the theme of the month foretold, a lot of the lectures and videos during this week focused on obtaining new habits, thinking more creatively, learning at a more efficent pase, good practices both in the coding side of the business and the people side of business. As an antisocial and kind of “stuck in his ways” sort of guy, it is a bit hard to come to terms to a lot of the ideas presented here, and a large part of me vehemently refuses to accept some of the things I’ve read. While I think that it is fair to understand and comprehend the self-preservation instincts of my old, closed off self, I also acknowledge the importance of coming to terms with the fact that a big part of what makes a good developer are their soft skills, their ability to adapt, to see things from others perspective and to learn efficently. I think there is value in that way of thinking, and even though I know this is gonna suck a lot for old introverted, prideful me, I’m willing to take this path and hope for the best. I mean, I’m 23, I think it’s too early to become stuck in my ways.

Another theme I catched on during this week was the importance of not relying on your gut, previous knowledge or instinct; at least not for solving problems per se. The idea is that if we get too stuck in the what we think is right, to what we perceive as being the correct solution or correct way; we start to miss on things that we really shouldn’t if we were to analyze things calmly and from a fact-based perspective. The idea here is to catch ourselves on our own habits, our auto-pilot, and question it. We grow accustomed to the things we know and the way we do things, but we should always only use these instincts as a guide in order to work correctly and ask the right questions. Facts precede over concepts and traditions.

Lastly, preparing my lighting talk for the week was quite interesting. While I had some knowledge on the topic, it was refreshing to reaffirm some points I had forgotten and to gather new perspectives on the ideas that I had. The presentation went okay, though I definitely need to work a bit more on my people’s skills, mainly taking into account the needs of the audience and gaging the correct tone for my presentation.

In conclusion, I hope to move forward using the notes, tips and tricks I gathered for becoming more engaged in my creative and intellectual pursuits Aswell as a better learner overall from here on out. I end this post with some of the notes I took during this week. Cheers!

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