Happy 2020! I know that it is kinda late to wish you guys a happy new year but so much has been going since the start of the year. The biggest news was that my team’s product owner has resigned and I am taking over him. The number of things that I have to pick up is huge. He has left big shoes for me to fill. I was initially overwhelmed but after composing myself, I decided to look at it in a positive light. I have been thinking of strategies of how to pick up the knowledge gap that he will leave behind.
Just some background, I am working in an embedded environment but I was trained in computer science so mostly dealing with the upper layer of the stack. I always felt inadequate about my knowledge of the driver’s development. My team has a pretty wide skill set so I never had to really drive deep into this knowledge but now I will need to.
I have been reading articles from common clog, and in his last articles he wrote about being an expert is about pattern recognition. I have too read books from Melcom Gladwell and other similar books which mentioned about deliberate practice. While I think that it is true or rather easy to see how it works, for example, a basketball player or a golfer, for a programmer it is harder. There are just too many things to practice and technology is moving so fast. It is not like a sushi master where the work is obvious and has been the same for centuries. Yes, there might be slight variation but in general, most things are kept the same.
So I always struggled to know what to practice. While I understand conceptually the idea of practising, I have never been able to execute it. Part of it is just always overwhelmed by what is happening at work due to the lack of understanding. This leads to self-doubt about if I am practising the right things and if I ever get to feel adequate.
So after reading common clog article, I realized that maybe what I should practice on is to be able to understand and absorb a huge amount of data. My job is to go for the breath which will also help to build the depth. In a knowledge base society where knowledge is abundant, it is not good enough to know that information is out there. We have to absorb it into our brain and hopefully build connections in our brain. It is an exponential system where know and understand more makes knowing and understanding easier. The more you know, the more you get to know. In this sense, there is no shortcut to success. I have to build strong work ethics in reading.
My strategy for the year 2020, will be to read as much as I can on a wide range of topics.
And recently I have a revelation about happiness, it is just able to wear comfortable clothes. I realized that I am most happy when I am not wearing tight clothes, clothes that make me unable to breathe. The reason for the tight clothes is I gained extra weight while my clothes still stay the same. It will be easy to buy new clothes but a better way is to lose the extra weight. Also being fit helps the body to feels better.