Learning the Ugliest and Grimmest Lessons

-

Learning the Ugliest and Grimmest Lessons 

Yep, if you wanted ugly and grim lessons from my software engineering career - you have come to the right place. If you have never been a neurodivergent software engineer or for a lot of other reasons someone who has challenges with emotion regulation some time - this blog post is not for you. Unless you are nosy as I am 

Emotion Regulation Will Always Trump Skill

"Your emotional and cognitive state determines how well you work and learn - more than effort or intelligene." I believe the direct quote from my notes is "am I in a good state to learn XYZ now? No, I am not in a good state to learn XYZ now." I can get to the state where I am so stressed out that making a cup of tea would throw me over the edge. So when I get upset I should always prioritise getting back to a normal emotional state. So much so that - this morning I was exhasuted - if I could turn back time I would've rested some more and even missed standup and had breakfast (whoops) as I would've worked better when I did get in.

I just did this well though - I was meant to watch a talk but felt after the emotional morning I had had that doing this would be more powerful. I needed time alone and to reflect on myself today - I am not very good at knowing that usually and I am proud that I did.

Pushing Through Frustration Instead of Stabilising 

What someone said today and she was right tbf was that "you often push through frustration instead of stablising." And she said that "You give 100% effort while dysregulated." This is true. This morning I 
  • got pissed off at my self 
  • didn't take the time to plan out my work
  • didn't take the time to eat breakfast (!!!) even when I got to the office 
  • started working on a part of the codebase that had not been merged yet after all
  • didn't take the time to wrap up my old work
  • didn't take the time to calm down
So this is not good. Continuing to push when not in a learnable state is not good

So priority number one is me. If I am upset, tired, hungry - I need to take care of that first. How can I work well when I am not feeling good? I did that a lot when I was in difficult environments. 

Not holding expectations of what a developer should look like 

I am more like a 12 year old boy than a 31 year old woman when it comes to my learning style (and choice of entertainment). I have such bad ADHD and I thrive off high aciton.
Keeping a blog really helps me and actually allowing myself to be real in my work really helps me. Keeping diagrams helps me too and allowing myself to include humour, bright and bold colours, and dramatic shapes really helps me. It's time to stop fighting that. I don't know what was meant by what a devleloper should look like. But there we go

"There is no single valid developer shape"

Comparing yourself to others certainly always hurts you. I think I am being taught a lesson on how I handle frustration - or am I

I am so stressed out that I don't even know anymore 

Putting things down and picking things up

We discussed stuff like - when do you drop all your work and divert suddenly - versus - when do you wrap things up? And how do you prepare to wrap things up? Or when do you prepare to pick things up - something I always have to do - and I failed to do this morning - whoops. 
So we are gonna do some more work on this 
And for this afternoon I am gonna wrap things up 
A digital image of forests and hills

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hello World

-
Image
 Hello from Susanna Codes! Hi everyone,  My name is Susanna and I'm a 28-year-old aspiring software engineer from Brighton! As I type this, listening to music from "Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain" (it reminds me of home, in Luxembourg, where I am from - I'm missing home quite a lot lately!) and look forward to some Irish Cream tea in my afternoon break, I am thinking: How lucky I am that my amazing colleague Rosana helped me out with a plan for my software engineer journey (she directed me to the front-end first). How HTML and CSS would not have been my first languages of choice had I not been guided in this direction, as in my head they were seen as 'less-serious' langages. How done I am with what other people think of me and if other people see the 'front-end' as softer then so be it! Everyone has to start somewhere. I am so grateful to be on this journey, with Codecademy's Front-End Engineer Career Path.  Thank you to Async Brighton as ...
Read more

“But yesterday, I heard God say, you were born to be the one…”

-
Image
“But yesterday, I heard God say, you were born to be the one…” Hey there. Still off work. Still tired. Lana del Rey released a new song. Thank God. My soul needed it so much.  I’m thinking a lot about everything. Thinking about where I went wrong. I just want to release. I want to release all the crap that is in my room. I’ve been trying to fully declutter since I was 21. I give away so much. I donate so much. But then I never quite finish. I never get to the click. And then I buy more. I don’t know what technique to use. There are so many techniques. The Marie Kondo method. I like to do kinaesthetic tests too. I like to pretend I’m packing up during the pandemic again and I have to make really quick decisions about what to keep and what to leave behind. That was no fun. But it was efficient. I just can’t release it. There’s so much stuff I can’t let go of. I don’t know how to. I don’t know how to. I suppose that’s a good metaphor for life. We accumulate stuff and we hold on to it....
Read more

Yosemite

-
Image
Yosemite I'll never forget the first time I head the song Yosemite by Lana del Rey. I very nearly clicked away.  It was quite near the start of my Software Engineering journey, right near when I start learning the Front-End/Web Development. I was listening to Arcadia by LDR before, maybe twice, and then Blue Banisters came on. I nearly clicked away in the first 30 seconds but I forced myself to keep listening anyway.  I'll never forget how that song has made me feel. It became my song of 2022 even though I only discovered it in November. I can still listen to it every day and get that complete sense of wonder and of awe that I felt the first time that I heard it. That ending of the song is completely amazing, and it just completely just blows me away every time. "Withstanding all the time, changes, and seasons..." - LDR Concise Body Arrow Functions Why am I so bad at arrow functions? Whyyyyyyyyyyy?  Just kidding, I am beginning to get them. But why are they so hard? ...
Read more