Hi everyone,

I think the title of this post says it all mostly. I am not here to judge you, this is me talking about my own journey and sharing my random thoughts on my blog 🙂

The way I see things is that the software field is a very fickle field in fact. We can never sit on our merits even when we’ve been going at it for a very long time. The only constant in our field is the fact that it’s always in motion, always changing.

In order to adapt to it, I’m trying my best to learn about new things that are way outside of what I do in my day-to-day trade. I feel it’s a good challenge to try new tech stacks. For instance, I started picking up Elixir & React.js for web development and taking a second look at Unity which I hadn’t touched in several years (4).

One thing is for certain, through all the hardships and the challenges, there have been a lot of resources and people along the way without whom, I don’t think I’d be where I am today. For that, you have my thanks 🙂

If we start thinking of what we have done in the past couple of months or even weeks, it can be hard sometimes to remember what exactly we have done. And that’s normal. For the kind of work we do, we have to go through an insane amount of information sometimes and that makes it very hard to keep track.

I read a post from Julia Evans and that was a great post. She was talking about keeping track of our accomplishments through what she calls a “brag document“.

The tactic is pretty simple! Instead of trying to remember everything you did with your brain, maintain a “brag document” that lists everything so you can refer to it when you get to performance review season! This is a pretty common tactic – when I started doing this I mentioned it to more experienced people and they were like “oh yeah, I’ve been doing that for a long time, it really helps”.

I think that making a habit and keeping tabs on our accomplishments may surprise us in the long run when we take a look at how much got done within a year.

Now onto learning. Like I mentioned before, the software field is indeed a fickle one. In order to keep up, as I mentioned earlier, I try to do things outside of work like working on my blog in order to keep growing and learning. To that intent, I created a gist of things I’ve used in the past and resources I plan to use in order to become a far more effective problem solver capable of using software. And I decided to make that list open source! I hope deep down that at least one of those resources will be helpful to one of you!

Here’s the list: https://gist.github.com/Kavignon/10cab8d86f453891f38b132d4f705dea

Have a good one and I hope you’re staying safe during covid19! Take care of your loved ones!!!!

See y’all soon,

Kevin

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