April 17, 2016
Julia is still a beginner to write answers for questions on Quora, so she tried to practice on her own blog first.
Answer the question on Quora:
How to perform at work?
http://qr.ae/8NYfUf
Julia's thoughts based on her sports experience - muscle memory based on practice, from 100 hours to 500 hours, a few mistakes and then reward experience:
Finally, I found some article to read, and then, try to express my ideas and concerns, relieve some stress.
First take notes from the talk:
1.
Constant learning is everything in our line of work and
the perpetual hunger for knowledge will keep you sharp throughout your years.
2. Like tennis sports, find a good tennis coach, maybe, it is also a solution to find a therapist that can guide your along the path of improvement of your self-esteem and self-evaluation.
3. If you are dealing with serious companies who will value you for
your strong CS fundamentals and the ability to think in math and algorithms, they really don't give a damn if you don't speak their lingo yet, because they will see in you
an innate ability to learn, even quicker than others and know that you'll ultimately be able to chew whatever they throw at you.
Julia's thoughts:
Confidence, and play nice, always be calm under stress at work. It takes a lot of practice, and learn through the experience. At work, you cannot play like sports; In sports, you make mistakes, and then, you try to fix them. Learn from sports activities's mistakes is much cheaper.
Still remembered that first day showing up in Burnaby central park tennis court in summer of 2012, I told a Chinese that I played tennis over 10 year from 2001 - 2010, one hour every 2 weeks; After 10 minutes to rally with him, he told me that I have to go to the wall and then practice against the wall. I found out that people over the park may have play hundreds of hour tennis.
Later, people ask me how many hour I put on tennis sports already. 100 hours, 200 hours, 300 hours. I started to measure my hours spent, I did spend summer time every day 2 hours after work, 7:00pm - 10:00pm; the whole summer, over 100 hours, what it means, I lost at least 20 lb, first time, I built muscle around my stomach.
Mistakes made in tennis sports:
1. Hurt my
wrist, wrist pain <- put a lot of hours on practice, do not have muscle memory to protect wrist; In my first 100 hours practice.
2. Hurt my
back, fall on the ground in a double match <- could not walk after standing up at office after falling accident. In my first 200 - 300 hours practice, do not have muscle memory, knowledge of balance. To maintain body balanced is most important, it does not worth to fall in order to save a point.
3. Swing forehand, racket hitting my head, my legs/ arms a few times. <- after 200 - 300 hours practice
But I learned from tennis sports, how important it is to love the sports; build up relationship to your hitting partners, help each other to practice, and get improved; How important it is to find new players, help them improve, and then, you have a new hitting partner on the court.
So, people will feed me tennis balls; And invite me to play matches.
Certainly, I also learn to play for fun, not too cheap; give people some decency, not cheating on points when playing games, give people credit when in doubt. Show respect and encourage people to play more sports through the game activity.
Right now, I am totally going to extreme; To play social games, when the team I am in to win 2 sets in double games, my partner and I will let the opponent to win 3rd game.
Summarize what I say, in tennis sports, I learn a lot of people skills from my practice. People can help you achieve more on sports activities as well. You learn quickly how to read people, and get workout done.
So, too far away from topic - how work is related to sports?
When in trouble at work, sometimes, it is ok to be panic, get frustrated; but, tell the boss that "I am still learning". Ask for fair chance to learn, catch up, recover.
Recently, I found out that I broke the principles when I wrote code, If I have followed "
Do not repeat yourself" principle closely, or "
Single Responsibility Principle", I should be less stressful to maintain products. I can exhaust all the test cases for a simple function/ class quickly, but I could not handle a function with more than 200 lines of code, just by human eye, not using debugging. If you play good on design principles, you find yourself in better situation.
Stop complaining. Just work hard. It takes more than 1 year to figure out how to excel at a job. My case, I think that it takes more than 5 years.
Blog reading:
1. Read this blog about
C++ study.
2. sports programmer - Gennady Korotkevich
