Reset Phase at Encora — Final Thoughts
This post is a reflection on my experiences in the last month as an Apprentice at Encora, I hope this series of posts can inspire and motivate others in their tech journey.
The first month at Encora as a Software Engineer Apprentice is about to end and with that, it comes new knowledge and skills. In this post, I’ll talk about the main takeaways from this phase and how I felt throughout it.
Time management is the key
When working on many tasks at the same time, it is important to keep track and assign enough time to each one, that is why it is important to start organizing our days. During this month, I got learn about the GTD methodology to manage our time, as well as the Pomodoro technique.
In particular, from GTD, I find the writing things down, everything that we need to remember, do o keep track of, is really useful, since we don’t have to waste cognitive resources to keep it in our minds since we know is stored in some other place (can be a post-it, a to-do list, etc.).
Communication and teamwork
In any part of our lives, communication is such an important factor, and a professional working environment is no different. If we aren’t able to communicate in an effective way, misunderstandings will happen, we won’t be able to communicate about our problems or ask for help.
When working as part of a team is crucial to have good communication in order to meet deadlines, have good deliverables, and even have a nice, healthy environment within the team.
Learning how to learn
One of the most exciting things about software engineering is that it gives us the opportunity to continue learning something new all the time. To do this is very important to be willing to continue expanding our knowledge, but also we must know how to do it. Some valuable lessons from Learning How to Learn are:
- Procrastination and habits are closely related; a good way to stop procrastinating is to put attention to the cues that make us react a certain way toward an activity that causes us to procrastinate.
- To avoid procrastination, focus on the process, not the product of the study (or work) session.
- Sleeping is the way our brain cleanses itself and is a very important part of the learning process.
- Instead of rereading over and over again to learn something, mix your study with deliberate practice, interleaving, spaced repetition, and practice to master the subject.
- It is important to test ourselves when studying to avoid the illusion of competence (convincing ourselves that we are learning when in reality we are not).
Before I go
This month as an apprentice was full of challenges, new topics, and new people, and I’m excited to continue on this journey to keep learning and growing professionally and personally. Something that I really enjoyed is this sense of belonging, even as an apprentice. I’m looking forward to the new challenges in the new phase!
