Since this is the first time I write and share about my journey as an apprentice, I figure I could share a little about myself before jumping into this adventure.
First off, hello there! I’m Ximena Sandoval and I am a Computer Science graduate from Universidad de Sonora, Hermosillo, MX. My main interest are Software Engineering, Cloud Computing, DevOps and a sprinkle of Deep Learning.
Aside from CS-related stuff, I really enjoy illustrating and watching Ghibli movies ✨ but enough about me, let’s start this adventure!
Throughout this apprenticeship, I learned that soft skills are fundamental in a professional working environment. And of course, communication is a key element not only in work but also in general life.
In the text "How to talk to anyone", I find lots of tricks and tips to help with communication. Of course, many of those methods depend heavily on the culture, but many of them can really impact how we are perceived by other people. The main takeaway from this is that people always remember how you made them feel (whether it was good or bad).
If you have developed software, you have probably come across this situation: there is a bug, you don’t really know where it is but still, change a couple of lines (let’s add a +1 in this for loop and everything will be okay) and you see the bug has disappeared. Sounds familiar? To me it did, but I learned from these lessons that this is not really fixing anything. To fix a program we must find the root cause of what it’s making it fail, that is how we are going to learn.
There is a lot more information in those lessons, but one that really stuck with me was the power of saying “I don’t know”. It takes courage to accept that we don’t know about something, but at the same time, it builds credibility in us. There is no point in saying we know everything and getting caught in the lie. By saying “I don’t know” we have the opportunity to learn.
I also learn about ideas and how there are just multipliersa>. There is no point in having a good idea if we never work with it. We also have to learn to differentiate between good ideas and bad ideas. What if we have a good idea but we never execute it? Or what if we have a bad idea but a great execution?
I got learn about living on autopilot as well, how we developed this decision-making system to not feel overwhelmed, but it has become an unconscious source of negative habits. Autopilot is keeping us from making the life we would like to live. This research has helped me to start making more mindful decisions on a daily basis.
Finally, I got to learn about self-transcendence, but mostly about how we act as a unit in a community. This is called group selection, which explains how groups interact inside them and across them in order to evolve.
Making badass developers teaches us about cognitive resources and how scarce they are. I also learn about how to save those resources while also learned and mastering a skill. On the topic of mastering, I also got to know about mental representations and what is the most effective and efficient way to master a new skill.
From Creative Thinking Hacks, I learned to see ideas as a combination of other ideas, which make a lot of sense and allow us to divide those ideas into smaller chunks to help us when we feel stuck. In this talk, it was also mentioned about constraints to problems that we impose ourselves, even when the problem does not have those constraints, this last point can add complexity to the situation and even keep us from finding the solution. I also got to learn a couple of tips to keep a creative mind and help the creative process, like keeping a journal, invert the problem, etc.
Lastly, I learned about progress and how we resist change. From this talk, we can also learn about ideas and how to execute them it’s good to start with something small and keep building from there.
Of course, there were technical skills and advice that I acquired during this week. Did you know about the tee command in the shell? I didn’t but now I do thanks to this lesson. I worked with an exercise of Queues and Stacks as well, and it was nice to see data structures again after a long time.
I also learn a lot about Ethics in AI, which was the topic for my lightning talk. On the topic of lightning talks, thanks to mine I now feel more confident when it comes to talking about a tech topic in public in English.
I got to read about X Workflow, which is a methodology for developing solutions in an exhaustive and effective way. It is worth noticing how it is crucial to understand the problem before jumping into trying to produce any kind of solution and I believe this applies to any kind of problem, not just a coding problem.
This week at the apprenticeship has been intense, but I have learned a lot about soft skills, the main one being communication.
While technical skills are important, soft skills are crucial for a professional working environment. Technical skills can be also be learned if we know how to effectively do and master something new, and this ability is a soft skill on its own.
I’m super excited to keep learning and growing in this apprenticeship! And of course, start working and learning from my mentors too!