The One with Recent Learnings • On Learning

I haven’t posted here in a while, which usually means I haven’t focused much on learning and I’ve made myself too busy with other stuff. And I really want to change that. Again. So this is an attempt to sum up some bits from the past week. The most important one: We have decided to establish a team learning afternoon every second Friday. We have noticed that for a lot of us it’s difficult to set aside time for focused learning and this is our attempt to do something about it.

There are no rules about how and what to learn during this time. You can try out a new technique that might lead to an improvement in our actual product (one of my coworkers did this last week), but you by no means have to. You can read a bit, watch some talks or fiddle around with something not at all related to what we are doing right now. It doesn’t have to be about software or product development. It doesn’t even have to do with personal development or learning in general. “Reading Harry Potter if you think that’s what you need right now” was explicitly mentioned. Maybe someone reading Harry Potter then educates themselves about transphobia and that teaches them something about empathy and that in turn makes them a better product developer. I like this idea of not putting any limits on this because anything can be useful for you.

Some things I have learned (more / about) during the past weeks (during dedicated learning time or just while working on a regular ticket), in no particular order:

the concept of Library Contexts
a bit about Moment.js and Faraday
to be careful with types (because they might not validate and raise errors but wildly coerce the shit out of invalid data)
a tiny little bit about debugging Vue.js/GraphQL/Apollo stuff (I still won’t raise my hands if I know a ticket contains any Vue stuff, but I don’t freeze if I encounter anything by accident)
using SendGrid to send transactional emails
the agile testing quadrant
a lot about debugging through logs and RabbitMQ
a bit more about Resilience
a whole lot about structural racism and police brutality in America and Germany
how differently a message from a boss person might be perceived by different people
even more about why deadlines are badbadbad, thankfully from quite far away
even more about how awesome my coworkers are
how nice it is to spend an evening with coworkers in the park (really missed this!)
how incredibly awesome my immediate surroundings are (people come over because it’s so nice here!)
that running every single morning is quite a nice way to start a day
that running every morning makes me very lazy in terms of other workouts

I think that’s enough for today. I will set a reminder to write at least every other Friday during our learning time. Oh, another thing I learned: setting lots of reminders makes me ignore all reminders and I think I need to learn more about prioritising tasks.

P.S. My editor now autoformats Markdown in a way that Hugo doesn’t like. Another thing I really need to learn more about: How my editor works!