Academy Program: Week 1
A brief introduction
Welcome to this article, in this post I am going to talk about the first week of the Academy program at Nearsoft/Encora. This is the beginning of the journey. The program Academy is meant for students in their last semesters or fresh graduates that want to challenge themselves to advance and start with the right foot, their Software Development careers.
There are 5 phases in this program: Reset phase, Building something from scratch, Open source, Personal brand and Real clients. Right now we are in the reset phase, just to be clear. Now, what did I learn during this week?
What did I learn?
This first week marked not only the beginning of the week but also of the program, we were told what was expected from us during this week as well as the assignments for the month.
Below, I will explain what I learned from the resources that were consulted. On their majority, these are topics about soft skills, why? because Software engineering is more about dealing with people than dealing with computers.
The first thing I want to discuss is how to approach someone, this is going to be beneficial not only for your professional network but also your personal life. “How to talk to anyone” is a book about precisely this.
The first impression someone has about you is built by how you look and how you move. Begin by being aware of these things on yourself, then watch how others react to you. Make others being comfortable when talking with you. Remember to be a good listener, accentuate positive things and sound passionate when talking. Talk about interesting things (look for opportunities), be an interesting person to know. Try to be out of your comfort zone and do different things. Empathize with your partners, talk about things of their world and compliment people. Use people’s names more often, make the first move when you want to meet someone. Finally, always be respectful to others and bring up positive things.
Now, let’s talk about some good advices for future software developers that are also “life lessons” from professor J. Ousterhout.
- In the real-world, our focus should be directed towards simplicity and manageability.
- Treat always your perception as merely hypothesis, do research and ask questions even if you think you already know.
- Understand how evolution works in terms of software, use examples when trying to understand concepts.
- Understand problems to the point where you can replicate them, assign time for follow up your projects, recognize when you do not know.
- Be aware of coherent and natural systems.
“Ideas are worth nothing unless executed”
Moving on, I also learned some technical things, for example the importance of knowing “The shell”. So, what is this and how does it work?
Normally, we as users of PCs interact with operating systems through GUIs (graphical user interfaces) but there are limitations when trying to do something that does not has a button for doing it. There is when we need a Command Line based tool to organize files, do programming, work with automation and several things more. The most common shell is the one called BASH. This tool can be actually understood as a programming language due to all of its functionalities.
To interact with this Command Line based tools we need to use commands, of course. Commands are lots of built-in programs already stored in the file system that we can execute to do several things, from navigate through files to do some administrative tasks. These tools are very important to Software developers due to the utility of navigating through our projects, making changes, visualizing contents and much more.
Going back to our soft skills, there is a term called Autopilot. Autopilot is the condition of sleep-walking into our actions. This is allowing an inner condition to take decisions by us without even noticing. This is due to external frustrations in our lives that overwhelm us and put us under this way of living.
Essentially, the pressures that we face in today’s world are: Being too busy to be aware of our decisions, technology is a double-edged weapon and spending too much time comparing ourselves to others.
Being aware of this situation will put you in advantage of your life, nevertheless, there are also 3 key questions to ask when we feel lost and overwhelmed:
- What am I doing to live the life that I want?
- How am I improving/creating new connections and relations?
- What am I doing to become part of my community?
In our professional lives, we may need a tool to solve our problems, the scientific method can come in handy. I strongly believe that practicing this early will make a great change in future challenges. In my opinion, it can be easier to summarize somehow the method so you can adapt it to yourself while slowly improving.
Journaling: Ask all of your questions and take notes.
Create a hypothesis: Generate ideas.
Problem definition: Understand the problem.
Search for solutions: Research, hear what others have to say and create a prototype to show.
Specification: Describe as much as possible the solution so it can be repeated.
Meditate about the way you think
From here, I felt like the material was a guide to change our ways of thinking, for example, we began with something called “self-transcendence”, I understood this term as how our interests change to get another way of living. According to the sociologist Emile Durkheim, our purposes/interests are divided in 2 levels, one where we satisfy individual desires and a second where we work in community for common benefit. From this, I learned that people are not purely selfish, most of us become part of a community. If we analyze history, we can prove that it is in our nature and evolution to cooperate with others and get something as a group, not as an individual.
Once we have that clear, we can proceed to talk about how can we improve our ways of thinking so we can impact in a positive way our lives and society. To begin, we can study the power that creativity has in our professional careers. To be able to develop a creative thinking, we may have to study some hacks. From a conference of the book “Mind fire big ideas for curious minds”, I learned that:
- Creativity is a kind of work. It is something we practice when we get stuck.
- Creativity can come from combining ideas in a new way.
- To allow creativity, we have to ignore constraints, fears and assumptions.
- Put attention to the environment where you tend to be more creative.
- Work hard and smart.
The hacks or techniques we can use to promote our creativity are: Having a journal to remember ideas. Escape by understanding problems, making incubation of solutions and elaboration, we need to allow our subconscious mind to work. Invert the problem to see it from different perspectives. Partner with someone to force ideas to show up. Fail, is one of the most important things, take enough risks so you can fail. Finally, switch modes refers to use a different mode of communication to represent the problem.
Now that we have understood how creativity can be implemented, let’s discover “how progress really happens”. The reason why changes take place at a certain time or not has everything to do with people and not the tools available.
Power is a resource needed to make change. We tend to avoid change because it creates work and requires thinking. In an environment of work, I learned that we have to be prepared to answer any idea killer that someone may have.
While we work, there are certain tactics we can implement to create change: power, if you do not have power use persuasion and then prepare with intuition. As individuals, I learned that to create change we should follow our idea as entrepreneurship does: pilot (experiment), share with others and repeat.
According to a book called “Peak” by A. Ericsson, there is way to master anything. There is something called “Purposeful practice”, that has 4 main components: Have a specific goal, do intense focus, have immediate feedback and allow frequent discomfort. Attaching this practice to expert coaching has been proved to create a deliberate practice. Therefore, the right sort of practice, over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement.
To finish this section, I would like to discuss one last skill we all desire to develop, this is how can you learn and build skills quickly? In summary, we tend to treat our brains like they will not get tired ever, and this is our greatest mistake. When we do anything that requires cognitive effort, we are also using our limited cognitive resources, and maybe on things that are not beneficial for our lives and we do not even notice this because of our autopilot mode. So, the way of solving this question would be learning to manage those resources and build a library of knowledge that you can share with others so anyone can learn from each other.
Lastly, I would like to add that I also learned about the life in Encora from specific classes that we received during the week. From those classes I learned essentially the next points:
- What does it take to build a community and international enterprise?
- How creativity impacts to help employees and generate new opportunities for them.
- The relevance of technology and security in times of home office.
- How an enterprise creates new opportunities for its market being innovative and developing its own products.
- The relevance of perspective and empathy when building communities.
- The relevance of all the departments in a company to maintain a strong community.
Thank you for reading this far, that would be all I have to share for this time. I am enthusiastic about the next week and applying what I have learned. See you in the next post!
