Software Engineering Goals: Owning Smaller Problem Spaces and Repeatedly Achieving Successful Outcomes For These Problems

I find learning really hard - so I have decided to make my learning journey public. This was never really a conscious decision for me but I have been doing this for a long time. Due to my neurodiversity, it is inherently harder for me to learn, and to process things, and especially to follow written instructions or absorb written information.

I would give anything to succeed and I would give anything to do what I love. I would rather share my goals with the whole wide world and have this blog as a learning tool and a platform and use this avenue and source of support than care about whether I look good, or have to care about what anybody thinks of me.

Because I would give everything for my career. I would give everything for my dreams, and for my missions, and my goal. I hope that this shows. I hope that you can see that too.

How Amazing My Manager Is

This is my fourth software engineering goal and my final goal of the first category. There are eight main goals and there are four in total in each space. All in all they combine to make me a better software engineer. I am so grateful to have such a clear aim and goal in my workplace and in my life. I am so grateful to the person who worked so hard to define these goals and who helped me to bring them into my life - i.e. to my manager. It takes a truly rare and special kind of person to go so far out of their way for you. I have been truly blessed and truly impressed by all of his interventions. I am the luckiest person in the world to have a manager like him.

I am the luckiest employee in the world really - how lucky I am to have people that will go so far out of their way for me and pay such close attention to my learning and development. It's nothing short of a miraculous contribution really. Thank you. Right, on to the actual goal itself then! Happy Tuesday morning! Yalla yalla! Let's go! I'm so ready for this and for this new day today! I'm so ready and so excited for everything. Thank you. I hope you have a wonderful day, whoever you are, reading.

Software Engineering Goal Number 4: Owning Smaller Problem Spaces and Repeatedly Achieving Successful Outcomes For These Problems

The main idea behind this software engineering goal is that for what we would call small problems, I shouldn't require any additional help or guidance from anyone else. This would mean my mentor, my manager, or my lead engineer (who are all seniors). For what we might call a medium or a large feature, I might need some help from them, and that would be okay. But for a small feature I really should be able to work on it completely independently and deliver it alone.

This is also to do with the amount of time I spend getting help on a feature from these other wonderful and kind and helpful members of my team. For example, it could be that right now, delivering a small feature requires a couple of hours help from somebody more senior in my team (this was defined a couple of months ago, but still). But it could be that after a couple of months, a small feature requires significantly less help than it used to, but a medium feature requires what a small feature used to require. And then so on. I am confident that this will move quickly. I learn extremely fast. I always say that I don't want to be like the baby elephant. The baby elephant gets tied to a pole. It's too small and so it can't run away. It doesn't yet have the strength to uproot the pole.

But then the baby elephant grows up into a big and strong elephant. But it has been trained to think that it can't uproot the pole. So it doesn't try and pull away. 

I grow very fast. I want to keep on trying and attempting to uproot the pole.

I can learn things very fast. Sometimes, I can get things very, very quickly. And you never know when my progress might come.

An infographic demonstrating all of my thoughts for goal number 4 - I hope that that is okay please - thanks - thank you. I am going to redo goal number 5 sometime very soon.

More Thoughts on This One Please - Thank You.

This ticket for me is all about practise. 

It's about - can I smash it out of the park - again and again and again. Can I smash out the park the delivery of my small feature tickets - again and again and again. It's about demonstrating that I can successfully deliver the outcome of a small scope product feature or engineering challenge - again and again and again. So this one is really going to take practise. 

Something to discuss about 

As well as having a measure of progression to measure progress against and to see how I am doing well, this one goal also provides us with a discussion point. Because we can measure progress and two tickets against each other. We can say - why did this ticket require less help? Why did this ticket require some more? What happened there?

It's about showing that you've nailed this

It's about showing that I've nailed this. 

It's about showing that I can do this all the time. It's about showing that I can do this consistently again and again and again. Smashing out tickets. Like I smash out blog posts. Thank you. It's about showing that I can do this, reliably, really well, again and again and again. At the moment this doesn't even seem possible but how many things that didn't seem possible before have I done? And the answer is a LOT. Many, many, many, many, many.

"I am really good at doing small problem spaces"

"I am really good at doing small problem spaces." This is the goal that I am aiming towards.

But remember the baby elephant. It won't be long til I am really good at doing medium ones as well. And big ones. Trust me. It won't be long.

A few final and other thoughts on this goal please - thank you

Okay, so picture the scene. This is something along the lines of what should be going on in my head omg.

"I've got these steps that need to be done. Three steps of a problem feature. So let's say, like adding a chart to something, updating a graph, and rendering an email. So these are more like the technical steps that need to be done, as opposed to my previous goal, which will be designing the architecture of what those steps will be and look like.

"And I just need to be able to implement these without much feedback. So let's say a problem or a feature comes in. And I have now broken this feature down into four points. And each of these four points are like small problem spaces.

"Oh yes, so I can easily do a new email. Oh yes, so I can easily do a new chart. Oh yeah, that works. Yep, I know how to do this.

"Oh yeah, so could I update this graph? Oh yes, that is how that works. Oh yes the graph should be updated like this and when it is updated it should look like this. With this data on it." 

And I just have some further thoughts on this please - thank you. 

Taking small tasks and just checking steps off

This could be the dialogue that is going on in my head: "Yep, I just need to do the email. Yep, I just need to render it, cool. Yep, I can do this. Yep, do I need to write a test with anything that's changed? Yep, cool cool cool - yes I do."

And so that's the task. This process of going over this again and again. Like in one of my favourite Lana del Rey songs - that was one of my main sources of inspiration during my earliest software engineering days.

"Over and over, honey,

Over and over, honey."

And this is the bit that I need to demonstrate - that I can do this over and over, again and again. OVER AND OVER, HONEY, OVER AND OVER, HONEY."

Saying thanks

I have read with autism we don't know how other people think or know. I don't know. This is baffling to me. It's a mystery. But the above two paragraphs show the learning of how to think in a new way. And that is all that I have ever needed to learn how to do. I have needed to learn how to think like a software engineer. Not just a coder, but a software engineer. And I am so so grateful to the person who has made this possible for me. I am so so indebted. Thank you. And have a wonderful day all of you who are reading. Thank you!!! Thank you so much.

And long may you achieve all of your software engineering goals, and may they be lasting forever. I hope all of your software engineering goals and dreams and wishes come true and I hope you create the life that you are proud of and I hope you love every minute of your life along the way. You deserve nothing less. Thank you. And thank you for reading my blog posts.

It truly means a lot. It truly means the world to me. Thank you