The myth says that a person who sees himself as a genius has to isolate in a cave(joke) to develop an idea and then reveal it to impress the world all this in secret, another thing is that people feel observed and judged when they make mistakes while working but the true is that if you are in good environment coworkers are there to help you. This behavior slows down progress, allow other people to become familiar with your work so they can help you. No matter how smart you are, if you don't have the ability to communicate and teamwork, you won't get very far in any job you do also It is a good skill to have to be able to give constructive criticism in a good way not in a way to offending. Embrace failure is an option because you want it or not you are going to learn something of those failures, unless you are failing over and over again at the same thing that is a red flag so be careful. When the failures come, you have to be prepared to receive them because some mistakes are harder than others, but the faster you can fail and try again the faster you will learn, practice is what makes experts. Be a small fish, be the person with the less knowledge in the room so you can learn from them also be vulnerable and be capable to admit the mistakes you made to your peers because this means that you are strong enough to affront and correct your own mistakes. Involve people in your project in the initial stages where they can actually contribute something, but not too early because there may be a conflict between your goals and those of others, the sweet spot is when your project already has a small prototype that can create the necessary inertia in people to begin to share that same goal that you had in mind from the beginning. This conference describes an ideal work environment and from what I have seen in Encora their ideals are quite similar to those of this conference.
Things that if you do you can be considered as a genius:
- Don’t try to be a genius
- Collaborate early and often
- Pay attention to your tools
- Pay attention to timing
In particular, I did not have any knowledge about the performance of web pages on mobile devices or any device, but I think that what was mentioned in the conference is no longer as relevant as at that time due to the gigantic improvement of mobile devices and the improvement in speed of mobile networks with this 4g and 5g. But that doesn’t make it less important in fact there will always be room for improvement.
Performance tuning loop (if you can measure it, you can improve it)
- Get data
- Insight
- Action
Pillars of web performance:
- Network
- Render
- Compute
We are in an era of explosion in the matter of digital content where millions of data travel the vast internet around the world every second that passes. This is what leads to the need to use compression algorithms to reduce the size of that content. It is somewhat complicated and technical for me but I will be studying a little more on the subject so that this does not stay that way.
This conference is a comparison between an ideal company and an old-fashioned company, starting with a description of what a manager should be like, and should be more like a leader or a servant for the team and be aware that your team has everything they need to do their job well. Asking your team what they need is crucial.
Within the company you work for, you should pursue your responsibilities and not wait for them to come and tell you what to do because if you really like your job, the reward for doing your job well is more work. Another thing to do is question things, like asking if something can be done differently. Part of teamwork is communicating with others so that everything runs smoothly.
All companies should expect everyone to behave like adults without having to stand behind people pressuring them to do their job, it is obvious when someone does or does not do their job. People have to live up to their responsibilities.
Some advices:
- Make influential friends
- Get in front of people
- Don’t be a victim
- Use the economy favor
- Don’t screw with administrative assistance
It is a very similar talk to “The myth of the genius programmer” but with a few different approximations to the behavior the persons should have in personal a teamwork environment.
Something normal is that your team has the same behavior as at the beginning throughout the projects in front of them, also communicate what you expect from your team because they may not know it. Do not let the ego as a team and as a person be a priority, you are not your code. Give autonomy to your team apply the bus factor to do that it could be useful.
Be patient with users because they are the best source of feedback, do not destroy the trust that users have with you.
There is no best programming language.
The best programming language is selected depending on your current needs based on the following criteria:
- Productivity: It is important when time is a factor in the development of the project. It depends a lot on the type of tasks you have to do and in how long.
- Performance: You have to ask yourself how important it is in your case depending on what you are developing, in general performance is not a priority and that is when you have to ask yourself if it is really necessary to dedicate resources to improve the performance of the application. A fast system has its cost and this is when you return to the subject of productivity.
- Reliability: How predictable is this language? How often I am having to be debugging? If your program goes worst with time? You have to ask first all those questions.
- Portability: Where you can deploy your code?
- Community: In this regard, it refers to the support that having a large community gives you, because you do not have anyone to really ask for help or with whom to consult about things related to language. It also depends on how the community itself is.
What you already know: migrating to another language could be a slow process depending on where you are and where are you going.
A question I've never asked myself is how do we make decisions? And the answer is that our subconscious is the one who actually takes them. Our conscious part is the one in charge of receiving all this information. That is why a good practice to make important decisions is, throughout the day, to absorb all the information that we can relevant to the decision we are going to make and go to sleep, during that night your subconscious will process all that information and make the decision. for the next morning. Linda along with other researchers affirms that humans are wired to work in small teams and that a small team is one that does not have more than 10 people. 10 is the limit is the perfect number of people, no matter what work philosophy you apply, if your team goes above this number things will start to get out of control. I found the way he relates the positive decision-making behaviors of bonobos communities to those of Agile programming quite peculiar and even a bit funny. And you wonder what do bonobos do? They have sex, that is their ritual to interact within their team and be able to make decisions together enjoying that decision making. This applied to software development people actually enjoy applying Agile development but the ritual is actually communication.
It is an excellent analysis of how everything around us is a combination of ideas and very few totally original, but this is not something negative, it is something quite curious that makes you open your eyes and make you see that in reality “everything is a remix”. It goes from the music industry to software development to inventions that changed history such as the electric light bulb or the personal computer that you attribute to quite famous people considered geniuses in the eyes of all, but in reality, those ideas are based on others, and what happened here is that these geniuses knew how to sell, develop and guide them on a path where they were actually accessible to all. Whoever's creativity is based or influenced by something, that's why ideas come from others, even if you don't realize it, that's why many reach the same conclusions or the same results.
The basic elements of creativity:
- Copy
- Transform
- Combine
P.D. I was quite impressed as it breaks down Star Wars considered a movie masterpiece in the science fiction category in many movies shot decades earlier.
Process improvement requires people improvement
Conference that talks about how all that has improved in the world since software began to develop are the tools. And what is the use of having better tools if the people who use them are the same. Also, this talks about how the people are different between them an even made a list of categories depending of the knowledge and expertise.
- Novice: have a little or no previous experience, it is afraid to respond to mistakes, don’t want to learn or accomplish a goal, vulnerable to confusion. That’s why you have to motivate them to improve and do things for their own with reachable goals.
- Advance beginner: this types already try tasks by their own but have difficulties with troubleshooting, want information fast.
- Competent: in this level you have more autonomy, and you have to do things by your own motivation.
- Proficient: in this category you run into a wall because you are working in the limits of what you know and what you have to learn it's very difficult when you realize the little you know about things.
- Expert: are the primary sources of knowledge and information, they are continually looking for better methods. Work based in intuition.
We are all on the way from being a novice to becoming an expert.
In this conference they make a reference to decision making as explained in the reading of "bonobos and the brain" the example is that you are all day working on a bug that you cannot solve and when you leave work you go home and you go to sleep, the next day you wake up and get to work, magically you already know where that bug is and now you are able to solve it, this is how it feels to be an expert.
No matter how intelligent you are, you can always get better, sometimes you can improve a lot.
A very motivating talk, the main message in my opinion is: it is never too late to learn something new. It is the most common to make excuses for not doing something, this talks fits with the conference on creativity last week by Soctt Berkun, he emphasized enough that creativity is something that you work on and not something that comes magically, in this case the message extends it to everything you set out to do. The next time you want to learn something new, do not listen to the little voice in your head that prevents you, better ask yourself, where do I start?
Summarizing the experiment that he describes, he verifies that being agile is a state of mind that one arrives at, not something with which one is born, actually if one is born being agile but the world is telling you otherwise.
Agile mindset is that you can always improve and learn in what you propose, the best thing you can do when you do not know how to do something, that is: I still do not know how to do it, but if I propose it and practice it enough, I will be able to do it later. or later.
WE ARE ALL A WORK IN PROCESS
It is a clear warning to something that we already have hardwired by the thousands of years of evolution, which is making prejudices about other people, having label boxes ready to put people in before we even know them is our specialty. Something that once functioned as a survival mechanism is now something outdated to be left in the past. It is important to highlight this being in a work environment with a coexistence policy as free and based on mutual respect as is managed in encora.