First things first

We’re already at the end of the second week of the reset phase in the academy, and at this point, that name really starts to make sense, they’re showing us the “path” to become a better version of us in many different ways, but first … we need to want that change to happen.

A new state of mind

The past week, we had the assignment to read a bunch of things and watch videos about a lot of topics, starting with communication 101 (How to talk to anyone), that actually makes a lot of sense after the communication class, “communication and how people see you or how you want that people see you” is fundamental to build strong relationship in every aspect of your life.

Ascending the staircase that catchy phrase and what means, actually sticks into your brain and trigger something inside you, you don’t really need a miracle or a divine call, or someone that bugs you everyday to start changing, you just need to said “f**k it” I want to be better and start making things to become the best version of yourself. At this point you achieve a new state of mind and maybe a purpose or a goal, call it whatever you want.

Pull it back and refine it

We always want to become badass developers, that’s a fact, but after that ted talk, well.. , I realized that a lot of us are making a lot of things bad, or at least I do. Sometimes you may think that you already know something and, fun fact not necessarily develop related, you don’t, or at least you can refine it, all the fundamentals are really important to remember and why not, go back and see if something changes since the last time you read or heard about it.

Divide and conquer is always a very good approach to problem solving, so why not try in the learning process, you just don’t build a house like yeah here it is, you need to build each part individually and obviously in a cohesive way (not windows first) so give it a chance maybe it works.

Acceptable performance make you worst

In order to master anything you need to practice and practice and ….. well yes of course but you need to have good practice techniques, learn for the better, always try to improve your skills even if it’s just by “adding another digit to the list”. Avoid repeating the same thing over and over again, find better ways if it’s possible with expert coaching and add tweaks of your own. Never feel comfortable with just an acceptable performance.

Find mental representations that help you through a new learning process. It’s always helpful.

Learning from students

• Keep it clean, keep it simple.
• Intuition as an hypothesis to be verified.
• Software tends to live so long.
• General — Specific — General (Learning process).
• If you don’t know what the problem was you haven’t fixed it.
• Get your new software in use ASAP.
• “I don’t know”.
• People are basically damaged by their fears.
• Always try to build long term relationships.
• Am I making a decision out of fear?.

At this point you may wonder… why bullet points he’s just lazy or run out of ideas, kindaa but that’s not the point, the assignment is about what I’ve learned this week, and yes I can talk a little bit about this topics, and all of them are pretty interesting, but what really stick with me with this reading is the fact that 6 people took a moment of their time to made a comment about something that they’ve learned from Professor John Ousterhout, one of them wasn’t even his student but they remember him because they probably make a change thanks to him.

Having the ability and responsibility to teach something to someone that resonates later in time it’s something awesome, it shows that knowledge never dies, and you are responsible to share it with someone later if it makes you better or helps you to have a different point of view.

The power scale

People make changes that’s an inamovible truth, but you need to have the power to make it happen, if you don’t you are just spreading ideas with a bunch of people. That’s the main topic of the talk, along with the idea of making good “allies” who really have the power to plant the idea and then see how it grows.

Having good networking is really important, that’s true but in my personal opinion I think this talk is just half true, we’re now in 2020, 11 years after the conference, and a lot of things have changed since then. With all the boom of social media now a little idea can “explode” and become a trend in a few minutes because now you can have the support of people all over the world in real time. Of course if a big name gets your back it’s always better.

In other hand if it’s inside a company related you must follow the recipe that they told you, if you work in a hierarchical structure and they are afraid of change, good luck. If you don’t and you work in a real horizontal structure feel free to share your ideas, seize it.

Creating something beautiful and amazing

Left Hemisphere vs Right Hemisphere are they really so different? A long long time ago in a village far far away there was a man making a portrait of his daughter, it was a really beautiful portrait just like a photograph or even better, he didn’t know anything about proportion or perspective, or even how the light spectrum works etc

but he was the best in his village, he always was creative and loved what he did.

Nowadays a lot of devs are in the opposite case, they think they are making just logical procedures and applying formulas and patterns to find the best and optimal way to solve a specific problem as mechanical as it sounds.

Sometimes we’re creating something new that’s at first it’s just inside our heads, we need to shape it and bring the first draft to the table, then add some tweaks and features to make it “prettier”. So are we really different to that man? We’re using that creative thinking almost the entire time and we didn’t even notice it.

So be creative and enjoy it. We are not machines. Enjoy your work and build something to be proud of.