Test or Die
This week I was able to improve my organization and the way in which I learn because the contrast of my terrible last week (in organization) was complemented with the completion of the course “Learning How to Learn” which I have adopted some tips that they talk about in this course.
Failure
“You can’t escape the Law of Failure, but you can use it to your advantage”. This week, together with my team, we have designed a pretotype, where we propose the idea of giving a food recipe to someone who doesn’t know what to eat. The idea of this in my head is to fail to try it, so that we can improve what we lacked or work on another idea and try again.
When you make sure you are building the right thing before you invest a lot in building it right. This can be applied to yourself, because if you plan what you are going to do before doing it, you prioritize that the idea works from the beginning and you do not try to fix everything in the middle of the process of something that you do not know if it is actually a good idea.
Talent is not enough
I have learned that talent is not the most important thing. And this applies to everything, talent is only a starting point or an advantage of the person who possesses it, but hard work is actually what will get you to the goal. And I have seen that many colleagues have concentrated on putting in effort with their tasks and have grown quite a bit in the programming world, that they have managed to bridge the gap between people who already had experience in software development and who can eventually overcome them, but it all depends on how hard they work to improve.
In the end a 2 and 7 in poker (the worst cards in poker) can beat two “A” (the best cards) if it’s played in the best way and the two “A” don’t strive to win.
Test or die
It’s incredible how important testing is within software development. I remember in my university that we saw the testers as inferior because we believed (in our ignorance) that the testers were the ones who couldn’t be developers and that the tests were not useful for much.
I have noticed how important tests are and that in some cases these tests are even more complicated than the application. I like to see them as a way to avoid chaos.
But not only that, the tests can mark the path that your application should take.
I have created some unit tests for applications in the past and actually they help you not to lose the purpose of the system and it’s a good debug to know how your code is working.
This week I had the opportunity to review and perform Continuous Integration in CircleCI, and I was able to remember that I have worked with Jenkins in Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery in previous projects and how important this whole process is that I hope to deepen in the next stages.
