In this phase, the main purpose is to understand better the basics, within a new perspective and unlearn whatever we already learned in order to reorganize, prepare and learn new things with a new mindset.
And with the basics, I don’t mean logic or programming basics. I mean why I selected this career, which ones are the next steps on it, and how to achieve and learn what I am going to need in the future.
Learn how to learn
Before anything, one of the main objectives of any career is to gain knowledge on a certain topic.
The first thing that I need to learn is how to learn.
Our brain has two modes, one diffuse and the other the focused mode, we need to combine those modes to make learning happen, studying, reading, and practicing is only one step, we need to sleep, exercise and make recreative things to help the brain to retain those pieces of knowledge.
Also, we need to space the practice sessions over time and be aware of procrastination. We have 2 types of memories, one is the working memory where we work with the concepts we’re trying to understand, and there is the long-term memory that is like a warehouse of knowledge.
The objective is to move those concepts from the working memory to the warehouse memory.
The brain is like a muscle, it needs time to develop, and needs breaks the continue working and exercise correctly.
Defining my path
Another important thing to be set is which path to take on my technical career. I learned that that decision is not only defined by my job and that I need to effort a little more to be the best.
I will be diversifying which technologies I’m going to start studying seriously:
| Native language | Popular languages | Risk investment |
| C# | Java | Kotlin |
| Phyton | GML | |
| JavaScript |
Learning from mistakes
The last paragraph is not a sick plan that I will follow on strictly rule.
Selecting a path is an iterative process, there are going to be lots of mistakes on the way and changes should be done to avoid ending with something that I’m not happy with it.
Is vital to maintaining us vulnerable and instead of trying to cover the failures, understand why that happened and how to avoid making the same mistake again.
Soft skills
One of the pillars of any person in the world is social skills. We as programmers cannot work alone in a solitary cave, we need to communicate with other people and work together to achieve goals, like learning, open-source, and the job itself.
Being part of a community is important, not all the knowledge can be learned from books or videos.
Share experiences, advice, and specific case information can be very rewarding.
Another important aspect is to communicate with other people, not at a technical level, but at a business level.
We are not “just programmers”, we need to understand the business level of the technology work, know how to talk to our managers, get noticed, and how to speak to clients in a language that they can easily understand.
Moonshot thinking
Moonshot is a mentality for making things happen, having a mentality of changing the world, but this is not quite easy, its haves some risks… Kind a lot of risks.
This idea can make things that do not happen very often occur for you, most people do secure investments for low profits, but big companies like Google have teams working on creative ideas that can change the world, like google translate and other than just failed, like Google Glasses or Google+.
I would like to make this someday, I think at this point in my life I have a lot to learn about this industry, but someday I want to make that Moonshot and make my own company or co-found something because taking risks is the only way that things can change.
The future of programming is uncertain
With this title, I don’t mind that “probably in the future the programming profession would disappear”.
It’s obvious that this profession arrives to stay, but the thing is that it cannot be done the same way forever.
New programming languages emerge new technologies arrive, others get deprecated, what is popular now can be just history in the future.
And even the future programming cannot be written at all, it can have other ways, like modular programming draw-and-drop boxes.
Whatever happens, it’s essential to have an open mind and see how this industry evolves and grows.
