The basis matters
This week was about rest and work.
The first thing I want to say here is that I had a job interview and although I didn’t know some things that were asked to me, I always said quickly when I did not know a concept, and whenever I knew another concept I verify if what I said was really what he was asking. At the end of my interview, these two things were the ones that most marked me as positive things that I had, the people who run the interview told me that they greatly appreciated that it was concise, that I validated the information I provided, and that my answers were short, they asked me to continue like this.
I think that all of the above has made me think about the time that the interviewers invest in an interview, the prior research, the organization, and logistics of this, as well as the time invested after the interview since their work doesn’t end with me, but rather they have to compile all the information obtained and compare it with the other people who requested to participate in the process, so I think that one as an applicant makes the job easier for them if we respond honestly and briefly to everything.
One of the things that made the most sense to me in this week was experiencing firsthand the fact that you work better if you rest correctly. And this week was plagued with non-working days derived from Christmas and the end of the year, so I had some vacation days, these made me realize how tired I was and how much I needed to sleep well since I usually go to bed. very late and getting up early, the consequence of taking days off has been that I have worked not only in a better way but with more enthusiasm and without feeling tired, so I conclude that taking vacations is just as important as working and I intend to plan these days in a way that I can improve my performance. I confess that this is something that I don’t do regularly, I usually work without taking any days off or getting sick which I like but now I see that it is a good practice to take vacations.
Last but not least, this week I had to relearn basic concepts of programming such as the four pillars of object-oriented programming (abstraction, inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism), as well as data structure and I want to emphasize here since although I had already studied these issues before, it reminded me how important it’s to “not invent the wheel” and that everything is already done, we just have to follow the same thing we have done all our lives as a human species, take existing things, copy them, and try to improve them in the process (we clearly never got to the further). This process makes us borrow concepts from everyday life and then we can transfer them to a different world, as it’s in our case, technology.
We do not realize it, but we use data structures all the time, for example, there is the stack that is directly influenced by when we fold clothes and put them in a drawer, the first garment that enters is the one that remains at the bottom and therefore is the last to leave since to reach it we must reach the bottom, another case is the queues that take inspiration in the lines to go to the cinema, for example, when one is formed there, we expect to be attended as one arrives, that is, the first customer to arrive is the first to leave the queue.
Perhaps all this is obvious since the first pillar of object-oriented programming is an abstraction, which implies defining the most elementary of an object and transferring it to code, but sometimes we forget the basis because we’re absorbed in thinking on more specific problems.
It is always good to check the basis of what we are doing from time to time, we may be pleasantly surprised when doing it.
