Month 1 - What I Learned

This essay marks the end of my first month in the Encora Apprentice program. It has been a knowledge-packed month: full of lectures, readings, essays, coding problems, among other things; while I may feel a little overwhelmed with consuming lots of information within a few weeks, the excitement of overcoming the challenges and gaining a lot of knowledge while doing it.

First, I would like to talk about one of the most interesting topics of the month: Learning How to Learn. It is an online course taught by Dr. Terrence Sejnowski and Barbara Oakley, in which they describe on a basic level how the brain works, how the learning process is and how to take advantage of it, meaning strategies to maximize the information learned in a specific time frame. As I mentioned before, each previous week was packed with information of various kinds ranging from technical (like programming languages and tools) to non-technical (ideas vs execution, pretotyping, etc.) and the information in this course was useful when trying to consume and remember all these topics on the relatively little time I had.

Additionally, this month I read and reviewed two books: Passionate Programmer and Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software. Passionate Programmer is an easy read, it is about career advice and tips about how to promote your own skills, stand out among peers and staying relevant in a highly competitive and dynamic industry; it gives actionable tips to jumpstart or improve your software development career. CODE is more technical and denser, but it is still a relatively easy read because its main goal is to explain how computers work, ranging from basic electricity concepts to full-blown modern PCs, in a casual and understanding way; it includes real-life examples, useful diagrams and bite-sized history lessons to engage people both from technical and non-technical backgrounds.

Also, throughout the month I learned different things, structured in weekly topics: The first week was about preparing myself with the basics of consuming knowledge efficiently and organizing my day to avoid burnout and have as much life-work balance as possible; topics learned this week included how to form habits, the importance of saving willpower, the scientific method, and the apprenticeship system. The second week’s main goal was to detach myself from a specific programming language or tool, instead focus on the core computer science concepts (which can be applied to every language) and then just learn the syntax of the programming language chosen for the job; the goal was achieved by me coding a sample application in Java, a language I was not very familiar with; in addition, I also learned about compression and its importance in the modern web-driven world. The third week’s main activity was coding an application that processes movie data using Java (again!) along with a popular data-processing framework; this application proved to be challenging for many of my colleagues, so I had the opportunity to learn about the importance of teamwork to create highly successful teams; other topics this week include quantum computing and unit testing. Finally, in the last week I was able to learn about the pretotyping system, which is just a step before prototyping, meaning that a working proof of concept is not needed because its main goal is to spend as little time as possible evaluating the product’s viability before jumping to the next steps.

*To learn more in detail about each week’s topics, visit their respective blog entry.

Finally, I want to highlight that I’ve been giving lightning talks throughout the month, which have proven to be immensely helpful: they helped me to become more comfortable with speaking English in front of an audience, explain a specific topic in little time providing enough information so a broad audience can understand it, and finally they provided me the ability to talk about topics I’m passionate about with people that can understand and discuss them with me.

One month in and I am grateful for the opportunity of participating in the Apprentice Program at Encora, happy and satisfied because I have learned a lot in these past weeks and excited for what is coming! I would also like to take a moment to thank everyone that is making my participation in the Program possible, you know who you are.

Stay tuned for future developments!