Tag: learning

It’s good to have focus. When I get out of focus, peformance suffers.

Couple things here.

Knowing what to learn. I am putting extra 2 pomos every day. To what? What am I learning. That’s the point, I need to know what I’m learning ahead of time.

So what I am learning? In the AM, I am focusing mainly on refactoring. I am focusing on learning how to improve the inner workings of existing legacy code that we have.

That’s good.

But what am I learning after that. I have opportunities during the day, then again before I go to sleep.

I need to learn about the technologies that we use at work. Cassandra. I need to spend even more time doing that. Map reduce. Hive. Then we have other projects, like scorer and the cfp pipeline. I am slowly starting to put the pieces together. But I need to review, redraw.

There’s also Java. I do need to learn bits and pieces from it. 

And then there is craftsmanship, design patterns. Those are all that I am learning and deepening my knowledge about. All good topics, wouldn’t you say?

I am really getting my ass kicked. And the funny thing is, I’m getting it kicked by a new guy!

But I notice one thing, it’s motivating me to work harder and learn a bit differently!

Reading, reading, reading.

Where is it taking me?

Working, working, working… where is it taking me?

I have to know where I stand. I have to know the systems I am working with. I need to be doing that constantly. I need to review that constantly. 

Learning differently. Reading is only going to take me somewhere. I want to acquire deeper knowledge about the systems I am working with. For instance, Cassandra. We are heavy users of it. But I have minimal knowledge of it. It’s a black box for me.

That’s why, from now on, I will spend one pomo reading about systems that we use. I will acquire detailed knowledge about it. For instance, I will read and re-read an article on a subject until I get it. Now, the subject is Cassandra. I have a long list of articles that I want to read. 

Drawing. It’s been on my goal list for some time now. I will now also dedicate good amount of time drawing diagrams of systems that we have. I will draw diagrams of the work that we do. Anything that helps. I will try to do a better job during meetings, drawing more.

Am I being agressive learner? Am I pushing myself? Am I spending my free time doing that? I hope that I am. 

I want to be an agressive learner. I want to learn. I want to teach others.

I can do that… if I stay on top of my game. I’ve had hard time waking up at 5:15. Maybe I should try to be in bed by 10, not 10:30. I think that’s a good idea. And that means washing myself and cleaning up before 10. I can get 2 pomos every morning. At least one.

For the rest of week, I want to collect 1 pomo every morning. 

But what do I want to learn? I think I want to read patterns. I want to look at beatiful code. I want to read code.