How did I do with my goals?
Maybe for the first time since I started focusing on my career I am really satisfied of what I have done in March, April, and May (it’s Jun 11th right now). This is due mostly to what I have done off work.
Work: B (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
I wanted to give both D and A grades to my work over the past 2-3 months. For obvious reasons, I won’t talk about what’s not working or what I don’t like, which is why I considered a D. But on the other hand, things might be changing, and I’m very happy about that. I finally have the chance to do what I love doing in a new project. It’s not exactly a data engineering project, but it’s about code industrilization. It involves a lot of Python and focuses on pure Object-Oriented Programming style. Thanks to a new colleague, I’m learning a lot in the last 1-2 weeks: basics of OOP, SOLID principles by Uncle Bob, and some design patterns. That’s amazing. I’m really excited and enthusiastic. I want to take full advantage of this new project and the opportunity to work with my new colleague, who has incredible knowledge, to learn as much as possible.
Work-life balance: C
This rating isn’t due to work itself, but rather because I rarely spend time on anything other than studying. After work and on weekends, I’m almost always studying. Of course, I relax for a few hours on the weekends, but sometimes I feel like it’s very hard. Furthermore I just bought some new programming books which I’ll show you in the next chapter.
Personal studies: A-
I’m really satisfied with my progress here. Beyond the skills I’ve mentioned, I’ve populated my blog with posts about Apache Spark during this period, which makes me very happy. Indeed the main purpose of the blog, which I started in January, is to document what I’m learning and so I’m genuinely thrilled with what I am doing. Although it may not seem like it, writing an article is incredibly time-consuming, making it hard to keep up the pace. I also published all those posts on my LinkedIn profile to publicly share what I’ve learned.
Furthermore I finally finished my first Software/Data Engineer project that I posted on GitHub. Details at this link: https://github.com/simdangelo/food-ordering-app-v2. I’m really, really happy and satisfied about that. I learned a lot while doing it.
As I mentioned above, I bought some new books on the recommendation of an expert colleague:
I plan to read them in parallel, if possible. Specifically, I want to study some design patterns from the book “Design Patterns” because, although I have already studied them, it was not in a structured way. I prefer to follow the book for its more methodical approach. Additionally, I started “Fluent Python”, which is an intermediate/expert book on Python. Although I am neither an intermediate nor an expert, I want to challenge myself. I’m also reading some chapter of “Python Object-Oriented Programming”.
I’m not sure if reading all of these at once will be productive in the long term, but I need to do it, so I’ll try.