Two years ago everything started
While I cook my pasta I write this post so I'll be short.
For my first job I did a test and got my first paid job as a Front End Developer Jr It was hard because we had so many projects and things to do that I wasn't used to (Mostly developers used to get there around 9:30 am and leave around 9:30 pm) I used to get home at 1:00 am so I had time to eat fast, shower and get some rest to another day. I had my senior developer supporting and protecting me like a father and I could learn a lot from him not just technical stuff but how to act in certain situations.
After 5 months of my hard core work and a lot of growth this same senior developer indicated me to another company DBR.ag to work as a consultant for some months in a big ongoing project at Chamber of Electric Energy Commercialization in Brazil. Was I and another two developers working hard to delivery the system on time but at that time was more independent and I could be outstanding helping and making improvements to the client side of the system. After 4 months working in-site at CCEE we delivered the system and DBR.ag hired me. At the Agency I started to think in process to help our work flow so I suggested and showed why we we should use Control Version(in that case SVN). I also developed a simple HTML5 markup framework as a good practice to all developers follow and it was very fun. After some months HP called us to come back to CCEE and help the JSP developers with client side mostly with JS/jQuery.
The rest you can guess reading the about me page so let's talk about some other topics now.
Outdated Developers
I had great senior developers, but all of them had something in common they were kind of outdated about the new stuff and things we could use maybe because of the hard work flow, family, laziness whatever I just know one of the things that makes difference in a great professional to a good one is his ability to make things better not just getting it done but making it better so I put in my head always look for make it better and stay update to new things that could help improve my job.
How I'm doing it
I'm always evaluating myself and looking new ways to improve myself in being a better professional. Lately (around 6 months) I discovered the best way "for me" to learn better is read as much as I can about something new that I want to learn before actually try it so I will have like an 360 point of view, a better understanding of it.
Something that I try follow to keep me productive.
- Know the shortcuts of your tools and use them wisely
- Choose some sort of "Robot mode playlist" where the songs works just as a background
- Keep focus wake up and think about your tasks for the day that you have to get done
- First do it, then do it right, then do it better
- Follow the most active and productive guys in your field, stay updated, read, talk, discuss about it when is possible
- Make experiments. Don't have time? make time experiments are very important to expand your view outside of the "work box
and this work is what keep me awake at night learning new things when everybody else is sleeping.