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Cesar Mostacero
Cesar Mostacero

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Resilience: a hidden skill that makes the difference

The only constant in life is the change - a famous quote that’s really true, more in a software development career, every day there are a ton of new things and we’re not going to have enough time to learn all of them.

This is a simple post where I would like to share, why I think resilience is a key skill for most of the people, but specifically in your career.

Currently, Software development is one of the careers with best compensation, but there are a lot of things behind this. One of them is the constant need to keep updated and that’s not an easy task.

Every project ends, even a certification has expiration date (either explicit or implicit) and we need to turn the page and continue. We can not think in all the scenarios will be the same like the previous one or think that the same key will open all the doors.

Yes, experience matter and every new learn will help us to growth. But it does not mean we'll reach the point when learn new things is not longer needed (or not at least to keep competitive).

We can not control each and every item around of us, in our career is the same. Not only in huge scale (technology trends, new programming languages, etc), but mainly in our short scope: our projects, clients, change requirements, etc.

Even when we’re experts on some specific technology we're not exempted of a struggle situation.

We don’t know exactly what we’re going to face in our next project or in the next company and additionally the fact we can't know everything technically.

But we can “train” ourselves for those situations: learn and adapt.

One of the best activities, at least from my point of view, is: problem solving.

The importance of problem solving or competitive programming is not only the fact of send a code and see a green button with the title of “resolved”.The real important is to understand and learn about the process of solving it.

Most of the times will be new challenges and that’s the exact situation we need to face. How to deal with new things and how to solve it. How to manage the time, find alternatives or possible solutions, face the anxiety of a hard challenge and handle the pressure.

It’s not only about learn algorithms, it's to train ourselves to experience (at a minor scale) unknown challenges.

Another good practice is learn a new language, not with the target to be an expert, but with the goal to improve our learning process to make it faster.

Yes, there are a lot of unknowns on the future where we don’t know which technology, programming language or tool we’re going to use, but what we can “control” is how easy will be for us learn those new things and it's always better to be ready.

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