Following up with the trend of #️⃣updateFriday, I had an update to my self assessment this week. At the very beginning of the Apprenticeship, I filled an assessment excel spreadsheet which is based on the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition and I was extremely critical of myself. I remember thinking:
if I'm here to learn, it doesn't make sense that I assume I already know things.
That lead me to fill the assessment with brutal honesty, which meant there were a lot of Novice and Advanced Beginner marks on the file. I had to constantly remind myself that it was fine, and expected to not know everything. That this was a safe space where I had come to learn, not to already know everything. It still wasn’t easy though.
Update
During these week’s update, I could give a visual form to a feeling I’ve had the past few weeks: I really have come a long way. This was represented in how I could honestly believe in my own knowledge to move some topics a peg or 2 up in the self assessment sheet. And the nice thing about that, is that there are still a lot of topics on a Novice level, so it doesn’t take my focus away on the even longer road ahead of me. There’s nothing like learning something new to give you a taste of all you have yet to learn.
In other topics, I have an update to the knowledge gap list 🎉
- TC39 ➡ I took the time to read through a lot of resources on how the Javascript language is being built. I also went through the entire issue / discussion thread on a proposal, and it made me aware of the huge effort that it takes to build a language. There are a lot of people involved, doing great work for the sake of us all.
Asides from that, I have one last learning I’d like to share:
Small plates
You know that piece of advice that goes like:
If you use a smaller plate, you will eat less.
Or:
Studies have shown that eating chips with your off hand makes you eat less chips in total.
Well, turns out they are quite useful if you bring them to a self-organization context (morphed a bit though).
The 2 weeks before this one I felt like I had too much on my plate and didn’t end up getting enough done. After an Agile Basics Workshop we had at the office, I decided to try and have a smaller plate, which could only fit one task at a time. Long story short, I achieved a lot more this week compared to the last 2, and I will continue using this method of planning my time.