Friday, February 21, 2014

Relearning and Abstraction

Through out my technical career, I have had many successes and rarely do I repeat failures.  Even so, there are two personal tendencies I have struggled with as far back as I can remember and that is Relearning (learning something I had forgotten) and Abstraction (divining new conclusions with existing data).

Relearning
This one is quite frustrating because I unnecessarily spend time learning something I had already spent time on but just forgot, often due to not using the knowledge regularly.  Just the other day I spent several hours struggling with a technical issue that once I realized the failure, I remembered going through the same exercise a few months prior.

This is to be expected as human brains are fallible and memories entropy just like anything else.  Even so, it would be nice to mitigate this issue.

Abstraction
The skill to calculate new solutions and divine data from existing data is a powerful ability.  Classically Sherlock Holms is iconically realized as the master of deduction.  I certainly do not need to be this clever nor do I have the time to train myself to be, however there are times when I come up with a solution that I look at and think "I should have gotten there sooner".  For me, I believe the best way to combat this issue is to stop making things harder than they need to be.  Also, I tend to be a bit myopic when running down a line of thought.  I need to expand my thoughts when researching to connect data which could lead to finding solutions faster.

I believe getting past or mitigating these issues could help me become a better IT professional and certainly would reduce stress in my life.