Spare a moment?
Teach if you can.
Invest in some time.
Learn as much as you can.
Perhaps…
Share a thought together.
Maybe if you’re lucky…
Trade a skill for another?
Who knows what you’ll might find.
From entry level to fullstack…
There’s always something to learn.
Call it what you want.
The cycle of learning forms teaching.
Imagine and reiterate.
The above with the below.
Apply methods with different contexts.
Tasked to solve – is pretty much what one has been doing to date.
Not knowing, but yet comfortable challenging them while time is ticking away.
Rewind back to years, where self teaching new programming languages was ever so daunting.
The instincts of knowing a language that would update in increments or a full re-write that would extend maintenance time and having to explain that up the chain.
Working with PHP this week and some experience of WordPress remembered in the past – felt like a task that one should attempt, be it if one has only touch the surface of this language.
The attempt was successful and the feeling of confidence has gained tremendous.
So the lesson learned here was be calm and carry on.
Things just keep changing constantly, another job another mess… a repetitive process of seeing code that may once have been produced to good business needs.
But while business changes are happening, there’s a lack of poor coding standard among the fast pace environment.
Factors may include limited time, short fall on talent, to miss communication between colleagues or teams, or just the nature of employment to human error.
I see that trending… a.. lot, even in well documented or reading materials, just check my Instagram feed out, pretty basic examples, but yet one may not see it straight away…
And here I am learning programming, how dynamic languages from learning JQuery to vanilla JS using React.js and Vue.js all work behind the scene, noticing state cycles and how interactive elements on markup react, whether it’s a button or a URL link.
Seeing data races when elements on pageload load slow or when users react to events on a page.
Or, when functions are buried within function and script files bundled randomly that causes conflicts among execution.
But, I’ve fixed the mess with some history behind what it should and shouldn’t do and where to look for these files to edit.
Sure it took several days or some week or two to get it correct, but not bad to say I don’t have the correct qualifications, just a heck of a lot minor qualifications and plenty of experience in and out my career progression.
Understanding ones code and then attempting to fix it, would be suicidal – it’s not easy as building something new with the common known tools one may use.
One true thing that does amazes me, how each user tries to navigate their way through a website or software looking for what they need/want in information or running certain tasks.
The way how one uses it, whether it was designed to do so or was designed to do something alternative – always look outside the box.
And now I’ve come to my senses there’s a lot I could do, but my time is worth so much more, only look at the bigger picture by prioritize crucial tasks first given working in scrum and using sprints to weed out the least irrelevant requirements, and when those fall together, the least irrelevant follow as if it becomes a waterfall of working code.
I still have lots to learn and cover, yet striding the tech stack swiftly with self motivation and some help from the smartest people I’ve come across, but one advice I’d give to all… Nothing is correct and not everything is also wrong, it’s finding that right balance of what is true and false using your own instincts, most likely from experience.
Those starting fresh, start early and make as many errors as possible, as later you’ll realise your strengths and collaborate where ever possible in teams or departments.
There’s a point throughout the working process where your attention to knowledge is needed elsewhere, but what do you do if you have scheduled work and clients fighting between themselves for your attention, but also here and there trying to bypass paying for such services?
Fair play, I don’t mind helping people here and there, but when expecting work to be completed at such short notice, especially which is an experimental approach (meaning something you’re willing to do that isn’t in your skill set) – what do you do?
Charge them a premium? Ask them to wait in line? Or, squeeze them in wherever possible? What if you’re unsure how long a work process would take given it’s not in your remit? Question, is this an accurate decision to take? Something that always keeps me awake at night!
Instincts tell me to be careful there may be a borderline, causing disaster without knowing and while others around you hang in there waiting for this moment to happen. A quick decision whether the attempt was worthy of you being in employment or a means to end employment if work wasn’t carried out accordingly to their expectations.
This is where backups are a highly important and should be available to recover if needed. A rule of thumb to anyone working in the digital realm, keep a backup!
Spending personal time to self-develop has shown many methods to approach different cases in work environment, but what if you have to develop others that constantly needing help? Leading the way for clients and their staff included.
I’ve been there myself too and realise the flaw in the working environment.
No one wants to teach others if they have to teach themselves to learn and develop while earning bread and butter to live (this doesn’t even include personal activities) – that’s like double work loading and shortening life balance. So what is the solution here you may ask?
There are genuine people asking me all sorts of questions, some even I don’t have the answer to, but I guess from my experience, if you really want to know something, start spending personal time to self-develop and stop relying on others.
Sounds harsh right? Welcome to reality.
Working in a software environment made me realise a lot of differences and advantages for potential improvements in business and self-development plans.
Ability to discover and make ground breaking improvement whether it’s just an idea/thought or tweaks in code. This is something that attracts me to keep working with determination no matter what is offered to the table.
This boils down to one personal question that always rises above others during interviews, what type of development plans are in place for personal development for employees (this is a big factor for my case that most businesses tend to rule out, simply because they expect you to know ‘apparently’ to become successfully hired).
There’s also the case one may already have these services in place and by experiences not all training platforms cover the true ‘know how’s’, which lead to thinking what other incentives do one offer… in-house training?
Doubt that, given the reasons above.
A new blog post due for this year and already one month gone by so quick!
(Brace yourself this might be the longest post ever).
I’ve put aside the thought of applying for vacancies three months after my previous post back in July, simply because it was enough time for any response and I decided to focus on what I said I’d do next.
Making progress in many avenues my health and wellbeing via Instagram, my ability to learn new technologies seen via LinkedIn and still continuing.
The general sense of interests in design and history, currency or money, but no value, curiosity most of all took place, knowing it might be small margins, trusting my gut instincts, filtering through people’s opinions and whether the media has anything to do with it.
Using my expertise and knowledge gathered through the web, my eBay store has gained some impressions and slowly gaining community support whether it’s genuine collectors or just support from different people around the web.
Up to this date, there’s only been one bad review and that was the first person that had purchased from a zero-rated seller, that’s pretty understandable and acceptable. But rounding up to three hundred, five-star positive reviews, it’s pretty untouchable and maintaining this tall order is not easy I can tell you this, a lot of effort has to be put in via communication and manual admin work; that’s what general people think is easy. It’s only easy if you’re just doing that!
I find it somewhat amusing that I can get interviews, but cannot gain a single decent salary from a vacancy. Was I too honest? Either way my heart was set in favour of those who had trusted me to deliver what I could.
It’s helped gained new insights to what is possible and gained me some (well a heck of a lot of) new skills where less knowledge was applicable and that comes to another point in my journey…
The last developer standing; always comes to a point when you’re the only developer in an agency to leave and I figured out exactly why.
There are many methods to build the same or similar approach whether using new or old technical languages.
The problem is not all new languages are available for old technology and when you’re dealing with less technical people, that is super hard to explain across in layman’s term.
Developers like myself either find a job elsewhere with more technical minded people around them or maybe higher salary often the case, but for me I knew I’d have to just quit ahead to find more time to pursue these problems.
It took me 6 months after a senior web developer left and I quickly realised my boundaries and I realised what these were and off I went on a heavy mission of self learning all different levels of development and that penny just dropped to how much work there really is in web development and why the demand of salary is oh so high with limited time frame expectations by bosses or clients.
Anyways, as a developer problem solving my self learning and living on savings made me realised something more important than ever over a vacancy and that is family and friends, they stay by you even when times are hard.
Been to two university friends and a close relative weddings and a christening after my previous blog post events; has put life concept into perspective. It’s not really about just a job or salary… it’s about having the finer balance of life. I can vouch for it by realising working early mornings and late evenings every week; soon or later that gets dull and depressing resulting burnout.
On another level having much more time, meetups in the technology community is rising and my mission is to attend as many as I can, meet people in communities who share similar interests and hopefully find some useful tips from there to progress forward.
Having a general understanding of many programming languages; how do these go into a CV that is somewhat out-dated far too often and it comes to a question is there really any need for a CV, especially when there are websites out there that you can use as professional CV profiles to do the job?
I’ll save this thought for a future post and until then, peace! ✌
Finally finding out you’re the only one with a technical mind, a logical system thinker.
Trying to make ends meet and continuing to learn as much as I could with the limited time I had in and out of office hours.
I didn’t see any clear opportunities left after knowing the learning qualifications were in another’s name.
The situation was just getting worse hiring external Back End Developers and my role slightly moving towards Project Management – not something that really interested me, but I had no choice.
I was at a breaking point; realising managing external developers is a nightmare. Set deadlines and external developers not responding in time for client expectations.
It was that time; I knew I couldn’t do anything more and thinking about the other colleagues in the moment of time and my personal activities – like my sister’s wedding preparations coming up…
I decided enough is enough; a much advance developer is needed for this role and with this in mind I handed my notice and continued to work till the end of the process.
I have discovered the Internet Archive Wayback Machine also know as archive.org – it’s great if you want to look back in time for something particular in the realm of digital web.
I always had this thought in the back of my mind, it would be great to trace back and reflect on websites I had created more than 10 years ago that are no longer to their existence – sadly technology is moving at a fast pace erasing the old due to legacy in hardware and software.
Wayback Machine crawls randomly on websites to archive and I was shocked what I could find… my activity since I was a kid let loose on the web!
Back then I had big interests in design and culture, which then led me to designing, crafting, building online social networks. YES way before the boom of social networks (MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
In fact I was way too young to be even be on the web. Back then the web had full of nastiness and you’ll probably have had to grant adult supervision, now a day there’s software for adults that can restrict time or activity usage for their children.
I used Microsoft MSN Messenger quiet a lot during then to keep in touch with schoolmates and using MSN.com to go on the online Messenger and accessing emails. By then I started using MSN.com like a default homepage.
Having a passion for cars I started reading and tracking MSN Cars, a sub category of topics they published weekly of news and articles. Having a short attention span, I moved into crawling other parts of MSN.com and the same with AOL.com when DSL modems were popular.
Anyone remember MSN Groups? Back then they were chat rooms mainly for the adult dating. I bring this up because it’s somewhere/somewhat where I started to learn quiet a lot of things, the good, the bad – what can I say… I was curious and fascinated what the web can do during that age, I guess I still am in a way – what make the web so popular and the use of programming languages behind it. I guess it’s the same when referring to.. looking for your next car, wanting to know what’s under the hood.
I learnt a bit of programming if you could call it that back then creating basic HTML pages and creating animated, glittery, metal-like, typography .gifs. This was the boom of .gif animations!
I got a lot of attention when I did this, mainly because I was young and had created a very highly hunger for visual graphics that set apart from other groups, by then group members evolved from all ages reaching to 1000 users joining as members in a few years.
Funny enough it was just an experiment based on my own culture and trying to meet other people like myself at the time – pretty niche!
Anyway, today this number is nothing compared to the scale of major social networks we have today.
Slowly I came round and was intrigued by technologies and ever since have been learning, developing and deploying my skills to the web we take for granted.
Going back to Internet Archive Wayback Machine website, here is what I could find – unfortunately the .gifs and images are gone due to discontinued MSN services and that not all pages where archived or cached. Reading the guess book was a little amusing at the time of finding these pages.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://groups.msn.com/bigupdahindumassiv
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://groups.msn.com/bigupdahindumassiv2005
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.bigupdahindumassiv.tk
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.diviyeshpatel.com
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.diviyeshpatel.co.uk
https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.div-bot.com
I was hoping someone/something/somewhere it would have been cached for history to reveal itself. It just goes to show what is achievable throughout history and that online activity and privacy on the web is not an option. I’ll elaborate further in my next coming post about privacy, as again it’s a can of worms!
