It should be day 63… I have had a really huge break from my blog, so I have missed somehow the days. But I haven’t missed my motivation, it is actually getting bigger thanks to this new year’s resolutions. They are only a couple (because… babysteps!) but I chose them according to their impact. In this tupple of goals I have also included this blog. A blog that will stop struggling for perfection and will focus on daily reflection!

Part of this apprenticeship journey, is to attend at least two SoCraTes ( Software Craft and Testing) conferences. I, Masha and Lewis chose Codefreeze as our first one, so we travelled to the frozen Lapland for a week to attend this unique unconference and get some insights on the craft from the crafters already in the community. Well, Lapland’s amazing, I really recommend it but such a conference might not be everyone’s cup of tea and you should really research on your expectations before deciding to attend. Personally, I have mixed feelings and unexpected takeaways, but this post is just my point of view and definitely not about arguing against Codefreeze!

Every event has a purpose. This was a big meetup of professionals (either freelancers or employees), who have the chance to exprerience Lapland and discuss software crafting/testing topics. As a complete junior with little experience in production, I was longing for more structured talks and more hands-on collaboration to trigger my learning mechanism. So in all honesty, I didn’t fully meet my personal purpose there. In our private time, we met great people open for discussions during dinner/lunch and had fun exchanging opinions and doing some katas. There were many games, a lot of sauna time and amazing outdoor activities. Although the marketplace of the proposed talks was very promising, in the end I got kinda disappointed (of course there were some great exceptions ).

I expected an open space where people teach by experience, but sometimes the style “this is my problematic experience at the moment, how would you solve it?” from speakers, was lacking structure and there was much effort needed to grab your own learnings out of it if you have never been in their shoes. But as I said this could work for an experienced developer, it doesn’t mean it was a bad thing. The overall feedback was very positive and we had the chance to see some faded Auroras! We also gave a talk about the HolidayCheck apprenticeship scheme to open a discussion about it and how it could possibly affect the next generation of software crafters. It was amazing seeing that people are getting interested into it and even convinced to bring it in their workplace.

It has been two long weeks away from my routine and it is time to get back to it. I devoted my day to an overview of the past year regarding my apprenticeship and I am trying to plan accordingly. My first priority is this blog, for many reasons:

  • First and foremost, I have missed a lot of my progress because I just hadn’t been documenting it.
  • Missed a lot of opportunities for feedback via my posts.
  • I need to keep improving my writing skills. (Punkt!)
  • It helps me manage my time better, although at the beginning I had the impression that it was consuming all my time.
  • I just missed it. It is a great wrap-up of my day! :)

So let this week be a great intro to Nix, full of daily documented learnings and functional!

Song of the day