Step by step

 

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”

J. K. Rowling

 

I learned two important lessons last week.

One is that organizing your tasks can help you do things in a systematic manner. I had many small tasks to do and the details of these tasks were mostly in emails. But referring to emails every time to check details of tasks is very tedious and inefficient. However, there is a much better way – put everything in Phabricator tasks and link information as necessary. Using the Phabricator workboard to organize my tasks, everything was visible to me in one place. I could arrange tasks as per their priority and dependencies. Earlier, I used to spend a lot of time thinking about what I had to do and should not forget. This would go on repeatedly in my mind, though not consciously. Now I am freer to focus on doing the actual work.

The second crucial lesson is regarding communicating ideas clearly, especially to people who do not have any prior context. Since I have been thinking about the project most of the time, I (unknowingly) assume that everyone else has some basic idea about it. This can lead to unfortunate misunderstandings. There is no point blaming Murphy when there is something we can do to improve the situation.  In communication, the sender should not assume anything about the receiver and make clear the ideas to be communicated. This was a great tip I received from my mentors, who explained to me about the XY problem. Also, it is always good to talk about the problem as clearly and explicitly as possible. The receiver should also not assume anything and should ask questions if something is unclear.

This week, I also learned about the use of virtual machines as a safe sandbox for testing software without affecting the host system and explored some methods for Outlier detection, trying out different features and reading more about how to improve the accuracy.

I feel this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more things to do. And a lot more to explore, learn and implement.