Summarizing an entire experience can be hard, especially when everything is happening fast. That is exactly how I will describe my third week here in Encora: fast.
Remote work can also seem fast, even when you are not watching people going from one place to another. Now it is more like: one meeting after another. One dawn after another.
However, despite the rush, I’ll try to describe this week's lessons at my best.
🙅♀️ Teamwork and management 🙅♂️
Teamwork is key in everyday life. Especially in Encora. We know software cannot be built in a day and also not alone. You need to have a team, a structure, a mindset of being able to work with several people from different backgrounds and cultures.
These specifics thoughts were made by Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman on their annual conferences at Google I/O 2009, 2011, and 2012. They said you have to have communication, and especially a fluid one.
The critical idea is to understand that software development is a team sport. In order to succeed on a engineering team — or in any other creative collaboration — you need to reorganize your behaviors around the core principles of humility, respect, and trust.
Management and leadership is also a tricky subject. We know that every team in every aspect has to have a Michael Jordan, as Brian and Ben dictated. Every effective team must have a leader.
But sometimes bad management can lead to bad experiences, professional and personal. So, try to avoid them, or run the hell out. You can identify bad management by these traits:
- fear of failure
- micromanaging
- hoarding and hiding information
- trying to be a proxy for everything
- stealing credit for someone else's work
- blaming for failure, either their own or someone else’s
For me, being able to identify good and bad management can be very important. Because at the end of the day, we crave for positive experiences. And sometimes professional experiences can be harder, so I’ll try my best to avoid poisonous people, another advice of Mr. Fitzpatrick and Mr. Collins-Sussman.
🌚 Agile Mindset 🌝
Dr. Linda Rising brings Agile to the deepest most spiritual level. She makes us aware of how agile minds are open to change. And open to learning.
How we can bring the agile mindset in software development, but into our lives. How we raise our children. Mothers, fathers, and tutors tend to say how we are “Bright Little Girls” — cute, smart, perfect. Do well. Everyone tells them and praises them constantly for ability and perfection. This results in them falling apart later in life. Not being able to reach those high standards everyone put on them, because they are unrealistic.
This applies also to men, how that are as well “Bright Little Boys” — little boys are criticized and told they need to “try harder” over and over again. Become stronger, better, faster. As a consequence, they mentally crash.
We have to start using “perfect” as a verb. Perfecting tools, ideas. Not yourself, but your surroundings.
Agile is agile, about learning, we are all a work-in-progress.
Continue to improve with age — like Linda Rising!
👩💻 Let’s get technical 👨💻
As we evolved our soft skills, we started to work on our hard skills as well. This week everyone in the academy got introduced to Polyglot Programming— the practice of writing code in multiple languages to capture additional functionality.
The assignment was to work on four different problems in six different programming languages. So you can imagine the challenge.
We also got introduced to concepts like compression, in the series of Colt McAnlis. One mind-blowing thing I learned, and that got stuck in my head was how Morse Code was like the mother of this great dynasty — compression.
For example, the shortest code in Morse Code is the letter “E”. Why? Simple. The letter “E” is the most common letter in the English dictionary. Pretty awesome, right? And after that, everything starts to waterfall. Binary code, information theory, the entropy algorithm, and the highlight of the video, the LZ77 algorithm family. LZ77 and LZ78 are the two lossless data compression algorithms published in papers by Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv in 1977 and 1978.
Performance is also our daily life as developers. Everything we can measure, we can optimize. As a young, padawan developer, performance has always been like a secondary thing for me. I have always have thought of it like: is it working? Yes? Good, I don’t care anymore!
But as I have been working my little way up to this industry, you start to see how performance is really important. Milliseconds can determine if someone wants to look up your web application or not. We live in a give me everything now era, so not only you need a great idea, a pretty looking page, your #perfmatters.
A reminder is always good, in my case this week was: the shell, stacks, and queues. Having a little work-through of your must-do, do not, and tips can make yourself work faster. This was my case for the shell, I learned how you can convert and PNG to a JPG in your console! No more pages with publicity or open photoshop, I can just use the shell! Amazing.
🎧 Remix in Software 🎤
I know this title sounds weird and maybe you will think I will talk about how you can use certain systems to improve your music development. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but that is not the case.
Just like music, software has evolved. For example, we know blues music inspired rock n’ roll. Today systems have a piece of legacy systems all over the place.
Also, like music, everything in software has its copyright, rules and set of to-dos and the Oh no, man! Don’t go in there if you don’t want to get into trouble. It’s a complicated subject, and I am not a lawyer, I just took a course in Informatics Law in college and just watched a video about uprising lawsuits in the industry software. But one thing I will recommend you, and also a little advice from Taylor Swift and me: get a good lawyer. Everything you do can be torn apart by just one paragraph or a block of code. So be aware of this.
🎨 Art, Myths, and stuff 🔮
Software sometimes can seem too technical, too overwhelming. I would not deny this has been the case for me many times along this short career. But software is more than dealing with computers, and code, or something you would watch in a Matrix movie. Is about people.
We all have heard of this programmer genius myth. This person who can achieve anything, I am pretty sure you have imagined this particular person as a male individual. I wonder why… And that’s is exactly the problem.
We create these prejudices about ourselves and others that sometimes we are not able to achieve or even work for. And also, these prejudices can alter teamwork, and affect our performance as humane persons. As I have said before, no system was built by one person. We need opinions, assistance, and company. And when we are working with people, we tend to make the assumptions about everyone based on their education, race, gender, sexual orientation, you name it. And I can give another full essay on how this can affect us more than we are aware of.
But back to the software environment, the software is about art. The art of working together sounds cheesy as hell, but it’s true. I can assure I will not survive this week if we wouldn't accomplish teamwork, leave our differences aside, and work together.
Finally…
This essay went from technical to motivational pretty damn fast. That was exactly my intention, a little bit of my week here as an intern.
Being able to realize this career is more than building the next Facebook, being the next Jeff Bezos, or “just put a neural network into that and make it learn by itself!”
Is about communication and making connections within yourself and others. You may think… “And you are doing all of this remotely, you say?” Yes! We have been able to build a community within the interns in just three weeks, we already have inside jokes… so, pretty amazing I will say.
