cakebaker » learning

Don’t apologize for being a newbie

cakebaker — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:16:37 +0000

On mailing lists or in private mails I sometimes read statements like “I am sorry, but I am a newbie” or “Sorry for this newbie question”. And I always wonder why do those people apologize for not being proficient?

It is ok to be new and inexperienced with a framework/programming language/whatever. Everyone of us is from time to time in such a “newbie phase”. And this means you will ask “stupid” questions (of course after you have done your “homework”, i.e. searching on the internet, reading the documentation). It’s part of the learning process. And it’s nothing you have to apologize for.

A lesson learned from a colleague’s burnout

cakebaker — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:45:13 +0000

Last week, someone with whom I worked together some years ago told me his story after I asked him how it is going. At first I was quite shocked to hear his story, he suffered from burnout, and because of the burnout he lost his job, lost most of his “friends”, got divorced from his wife, and became sick. Quite sad. However, in the meantime, he fortunately recovered from this bad luck, he left the IT field and he is now doing what he loves most, something with sports.

Afterwards, I thought awhile about his story and whether there were some signs of a looming burnout at the time I worked with him. With hindsight, I think, yes, there were some signs I could have seen if I would have been more sensitive about this topic. Because he often joked: “I wish I would be a gardener”. With the wisdom of hindsight, I think it was an encrypted help message: “Hey, I’m unhappy with my job. Help me!”

Anyway, I can’t change the past, I can only learn from it. And for me the main learning is that I have to listen better, because there are people out there who think they are strong enough and for whom it is a sign of weakness to reach out for help…

Take care!

Growing by eating less Cake

cakebaker — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:27:29 +0000

As you probably know I don’t get along very well with some core developers of CakePHP. I tried to keep this conflict away from what I write in this blog, but I wasn’t always successful with that. Some posts got a slightly negative touch. And it became harder and harder to avoid this negative touch because I’m also a bit tired of eating Cake…

So I have to change something if I don’t want to end as an unhappy developer/blogger.

And this change will be to eat less Cake in the new year. And to eat more ~~vegetables~~ other goodies. On my list are currently the Yii framework (Jonah Turnquist has recently written some interesting articles about it in his blog), flow3 (an upcoming PHP 5.3 framework with some nice concepts like AOP), and the usual suspects Ruby on Rails and Django.

Learning a new framework should help me to grow as a developer. And what do you do to grow as a developer in 2009?

A Happy New Year! And thank you for reading this blog in 2008 :)