Takeaways from the first job

Last December, I transited to a new workplace to seek out new challenges, beyond my operations-focused job scope. As I mourned my career transition from my first job, I reflected and wished I had done more in the following areas:

Personal Development

I didn't have a direction as to what I wanted to do or learn. There was no strong desire in learning. Despite having access to corporate Udemy courses, I didn't leverage them fully.

I recalled being frustrated when my colleague told me "You need to know what you want". Looking back, this statement has value. With the little wisdom gained, I started to list down things I am interested in.

Proactiveness

Being fresh in the industry, I was eager in contributing to the team's productivity by improving processes and creating tools (e.g. automation scripts, etc). However, I hesitated because the other engineers cautioned me against doing work that is not defined as requirements.

I thought "Since my senior says so, best not to do it". Perhaps, one of my greatest regrets was choosing not to do it, just because someone else said so. In hindsight, I was fearful of being shamed with a "Told you so".

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Challenges & Retrospectives

With these takeaways, I charge ahead for the year 2022 to pursue knowledge and take more initiative in my new workplace

Performing at an Unsustainable Pace

Challenge faced

One of the biggest adversities was that I am required to cover for another teammate's project which involves infrastructure and networking at a short notice due to a family medical emergency.

It was nerve-wracking for me as it requires me to perform with my weaker skillset for the week. When the team reached out to me, I felt demoralized when I could not answer their queries right away. I also felt bad having to reach out for my colleague's help when he was busy attending to his family medical emergency.

Retrospective

Food for Thought

I have placed myself in the performance zone, expecting myself to know everything when there was little documentation for me to attune myself to the project's requirements.

What I did well

Using whatever little architecture diagram I can find, I attempt to trace through the traffic flow and troubleshoot the issues in the infrastructure. Despite being arduous and painful, I stayed on and kept on trying in finding solutions to remove the project's blockers.

Despite being somewhat forced, I underwent somewhat an accelerated learning process to gain a bit of knowledge in troubleshooting infrastructure 😂

Areas of Improvement

I got extensively overwhelmed and narrow-visioned. Stress got the better of me at times, and I went into multiple rounds of venting. I am grateful that my teammates are super supportive and provided me with their listening ear throughout the week 🥹

Impatience

Background Context

I decided to start technical writing on Hashnode as I wanted to continue accumulating my "nuggets of wisdom" on a platform instead of a Word document. It was something I did to snapshot my learning experience back in my first job.

Here's one of my learning experience snapshots I did this year

Challenge faced

I got too excited and searched through the "Request for Articles" section. I compiled the list of RFA that I would like to write on. Upon taking up the very first RFA, I was discouraged when I took longer than expected time (4 days). In the end, my technical writing journey slow down quite a bit... I haven't published any articles for the past months.

Retrospective

Perhaps it's a sign of self-induced burnout. I took some time to slow down to reflect on my "Why" for wanting to write technical writing.

Sure, if this blog can be monetised, that's great! But that's not my main goal. My goal is to document these details that can help future me, should I ever Google for them.

With that aside, I have started creating the technical resources (source codes, etc) and started penning down some draft articles over the past month. I am taking my time to create content and I look forward to being able to post at a more consistent and sustainable pace soon.

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Summary

There are moments of frustration and fatigue this year. Even so, there is a silver lining in every cloud. I believe in the potential of time to grow my inner vessel as I overcome each adversity that comes my way.

This has been one long reflection about the happenings in my dev journey.

Look out for the next dev retro on "nuggets of wisdom" I have gained this year!

Merry Christmas! Cheers 🍻