Dev Updates: February
February ended in a blink of any eye and so there’s not much to update on in terms of my progress. But speaking of eye’s, I had a painful eye infection last week. It was a pretty horrible experience! Thankfully, once I started on my medication, I got better quickly. The coolest thing that happened in February was getting to demo the project my team and I had been working on since December to Senior Fleetcor and Digital Native staff. This is the first demo I have ever done and so was genuinely nervous for the entire hour. I knew I had practiced my introduction speech and the part where I talked about what I had done for the User Interface. However, it always feel different when you have a live audience who are there to hear you speak. Once the team started getting feedback and questions at the end of the demo, I started to relax. There was no reason to worry though, I didn’t make any mistakes really and it turned out to be one of the best experiences I’ve had at Fleetcor so far.
In March my main focus is practice, practice practice! When Digital Native explained that working in an apprenticeship is very different from working in a traditional academic manner, I got what they meant, but it was only when I started doing the work that I realised just how different it was. As someone who is used to writing notes and memorising for exams, coding demands that I completely shift my understanding of what learning actually looks like. As a software engineer, it’s more important to quickly understand a concept then spend 80% of your time practicing. My brain hasn’t fully processed this, so many times I find myself at crossroads- do I take extensive notes of this 3 hour course, or do I just recreate the app in Visual Studio Code? I’ve been thinking about the famous ceramics class study by NYU Professor Katherine Dillon quite a lot recently. The study explores the value of quantity over quality- where students who made more pots performed better than the students who just focused on making one perfect pot. In academics, usually you are working towards one final exam at the end of term to show what you have learned. But in tech and in an apprenticeship, you have to document what you have learned monthly, or weekly if working in a Scrum sprint. Slowly but surely, my brain is letting go of this idea of an upcoming “exam”. In March I’m just going to make as much stuff as I can and fail faster- its much more fun for me to learn like this any way.
I’m so proud of the progress I’ve made. To think this all started on some random day in 2020, when I wrote my first line of code and didn’t think much of it. Now I get to demo what I’ve made! There are so many great milestones to come, I just have to keep my head down and practice, practice, practice.
