Learning

Top of my mind at the moment is the subject of learning. I changed jobs a few months ago. My new employer, and the team and management I work with, I hold in very high regard; it has been a very positive move. However, the change has been a major shift for me. First, the company size has gone from a small handful of people to around ten thousand - quite a culture shock. There’s also a shift in domain knowledge required, meaning that I feel like I’m right at the bottom of a massive learning curve.

Ok, not right at the bottom now; I am clawing my way up it, inch by inch. There are lots of new areas for me to get my head round:

• The processes and techniques around working as part of a development team of around twenty people, making heavy use of cloud services and continuous integration
• Using technologies largely new to me, eg the JavaScript ecosystem (React / Redux / sagas / async)
• A locked-down environment making it hard to move learning notes between “work” and “home” (including Citrix - boo)

I have felt slightly on the back foot, as expectations are high and I’ve wanted to “just get going” and achieve things. But I realise I need to be more systematic now about spending time on learning and development, to get much more comfortable with the languages, techniques, platforms etc that I’m now using.

Progress is certainly being made. I know infinitely more JavaScript than I did a few months ago (and that’s not even hyperbole). But there are a few particular areas that are really slowing me down - mainly around testing in JavaScript using Jest and Cypress. I realised today that there are some courses available through work that I can take up in some of these areas, using some of the “10% time” I am encouraged to use.

There is also cultural learning to pursue, again with opportunities there - the company strongly supports DE&I, for instance, which I’ve believed for a long time now that diversity encourages better outcomes.

So - time to power up Anki, logseq and deliberate practice in order to and methodically learn stuff!

Photo by Gabriel Sollmann on Unsplash