Choosing a career path could be equally exciting and scary.

I’ve developed software for many years and in the last years I’ve reached a point in my career when engineering problems were still very fun to work with but novelty was rather scarce. Furthermore, there was not much room to grow further technically, at least within my company. This made me ponder — what is the next step for me?

Coincidentally, my company was going through a period of rapid growth at exactly the same time, aiming to evolve from a start-up to a scale-up. As it often happens, these periods are characterized by lots of new challenges and opportunities. Having already lead teams and managed people for years (I was a Team Lead at the time), I now had an opportunity to take the next step in this direction — become a Group Engineer Manager (a group consists of multiple teams), and help scale and shape the organization.

As my next career step was not clear to me, I spiraled into a long deliberation.

Long deliberation

This opportunity was amazing due to many factors, these were the main ones for me:

• Building trust, connecting with people and leading them is something that I do naturally and thoroughly enjoy. This position would allow me to learn to do it with a much bigger and diverse group of people and with much higher stakes.
• I’d get more insight into how organizations grow and be able to participate in that process. How often do you get to peek behind the curtain? Even more so, I would be able to ask all the questions I have and contribute to making decisions.
• I’d still have quite a lot of exposure to technology. I’d oversee all major developments and contribute to the architecture of our cloud and mobile services.

Despite all of those, I still had 2 major concerns that prevented me from committing to this new position.

1. Being a manager is evil

I had my first real manager — let’s call him Bernard — when I was 19. I was still a university student at the time, despite that I was working as a fulltime Junior Software Developer. I was doing well at work — I was receiving good feedback from my teammates and when it was time for my first performance evaluation talk, I was hopeful for some kind of promotion. In the end, good efforts should be rewarded, right? At least that’s what my 19-year old naive self thought.

During the performance evaluation meeting Bernard told me that the feedback from the team is fantastic, that I’m doing really well and that I should keep doing what I was doing. I inquired if it’s possible to bump my salary a bit. I vividly remember his response and especially the delivery of his response:

“A raise? You’re a university student, what the hell do you need more money for? You’re just gonna buy more beer and stupid stuffHAHAHA” as he started to gather his things to leave the meeting room.

And that’s when a sentiment that managers are evil was born for me. Was I hurt by the fact that I wouldn’t get a raise? Yes, absolutely. Was it the thing that really scarred me? No, not at all. What scarred me was the absolute blatant disregard with which this guy treated me, just because I was a young junior and couldn’t stand up for myself in that setting too well. This was not the end of it though — Bernard would not give me any promotion/raises for another year.

What’s fascinating to me about the human psyche is that the initial unpleasant experience with Bernard dictated how I’d view the profession for many years to come. I actually haven’t had a bad manager since, but nonetheless, the resentment I had for my first real manager has stained the whole profession for me, even almost a decade later.

…the resentment I had for my first real manager has stained the whole profession for me, even almost a decade later.

2. Fear of letting go of my engineer identity

Being an engineer is how I defined myself professionally for almost a decade. It’s a profession I strived for and worked hard to get good at. It’s the first thing that comes to my mind when people ask about what I do. It’s what allowed me to lead the lifestyle I’m leading, experience the personal growth I’ve experienced and meet some really amazing people along the way.

Commitment to the Group Manager role would mean to move beyond that and start figuring out my new identity. I view people management as a profession of its own, that requires one to learn a whole new skillset. It takes time to learn how to apply this skillset and it takes a lot of discipline to stick to the new role without relapsing back to what’s known and comfortable — being a Software Engineer. And the temptation is hard — the new management world can be so confusing (nothing changes quicker than people’s emotions and moods I’ve learnt), and the old engineering world is so clear, so close, so accessible.

…it takes a lot of discipline to stick to the new role without relapsing back to what’s known and comfortable…

Making the decision

It felt very scary to stand on this cliff, staring into the deep water of this new abyss. Despite knowing that you can always go back (and it’s actually very easy to turn back), it’s not the feeling you have in the moment. Luckily for me, I love the thrill of the jump and the opportunity to explore a tremendous amount of unknown territory ahead.

I made the jump — I am now a Group Engineering Manager. I will share my experience here and if the first 7 months are any indication — it’s going to be a fun ride! Our brains trigger the same physiological reaction for fear and excitement, so maybe it was excitement all along — excitement to rewrite my outdated truths about management and discover this whole new world.

The more I work, the more I realise that the strategic thinking and problem solving skills are more valuable than writing several lines of code in Java/Kotlin/Groovy/Javascript/Python. Ironically, many software developers (myself included) put so much time into improving coding skills without dedicating enough, if any, time towards learning how to think more efficiently. Sure, our thought processes naturally evolve with time and experience, but this generally comes only as a by-product of professional growth.

Reading ‘Pragmatic thinking and learning’ motivated me to put conscious effort into learning how to make better use of my brain. I’ve tried different suggestions from the book, and these particular ones have worked well for me:

• Motivating the brain to produce more ideas
• Learning to engage the creative part of the brain

Motivating the brain to produce more ideas

Most of you would be familiar with an exercise called “brainstorming” when people sit down and try to crunch out some ideas. But our brains do not really need a ritual to produce ideas — it happens naturally, at random times throughout the day. I believe that with time as our minds get more and more occupied with various issues, our brain’s idea generating channel effectively gets muted. I now try to capture all the ideas (usually on paper — here is why) and random thoughts that pop into my head. I imagine it as training a puppy — whenever a puppy behaves well, it gets a treat. In this case a puppy is my brain, good behaviour is producing an idea (any idea) and a treat is the fact that I acknowledge and write it down. This motivates the brain to produce more and more ideas.

I advise having a place — document, spreadsheet, mind map, board, etc — where you can store your ideas long term. For me a Trello board has been working great for years:

Roughly once a week I go through the pile of ideas that I’ve gathered. Some of them (maybe even most of them!) go straight to trash, some I refine and keep in the ‘ideas’ section for another week, and some are good enough to be moved to ‘to do’. It feels like gathering lego blocks for the whole week and then looking through the pieces to see if any of them can contribute towards building my future.

By doing this I felt like I was letting my subconscious thought process know that I acknowledge and appreciate all of its hard work. With this positive reinforcement, I noticed that every week I had more and more ideas. In the end, who does not like to be acknowledged?

Engaging the creative part of the brain

Involve the senses

I talk about different modes of the brain — one is our conscious way of operating (L mode) and the other one is a free-spirited unconscious source of creativity (R mode). The best results happen when there is a stable connection between the two, the question is how to create, maintain and make this connection stronger.

Our senses are our friends here. Did you notice that some people fiddle with a pen or something of that sort when they are thinking? It is fun to do, but it serves a more important process — an increase in sensory input stimulates our R-mode (in other words — creativity). I’ve noticed that many chess players fiddle with pawns and pieces while playing — for example, check out this game between the World Champion Magnus Carlson and one the best players in the world Daniil Dubov:

Using cross-sensory feedback stimulates the creative part even more. You can write an idea/design down, draw a visual representation of your thoughts, try to describe the problem out loud, or try to argue the point from different angles (maybe even involve your colleagues). You could go as far as acting out the roles involved, which for me makes the thinking process simply more playful and enjoyable.

Letting the mind flow

I have a habit of getting completely submerged into my job. It helps me to a great extent with my career but also has a big impact on other areas of my life since I barely stop thinking about the work problems. Be it a technical challenge or figuring out how to grow our engineering department or how to reduce our turnover rate — all of these problems are captivating and fun to solve; however, I realized that I started to slowly abandon an unrestricted, free-flowing state of mind. I believe it is absolutely critical to give our minds opportunities to be in that state so it can de-clutter, re-organise and simply rest from all the conscious thinking that is enforced on it. But how do we get there?

I was extremely skeptical about it at first, but simple 30–60 minute walks have become an inseparable part of my daily routine. The main rule is to not have any agenda for these walks, so going to get groceries does not count! By having no agenda, I simply focus on soaking in the surrounding environment (sights, sounds, weather, etc) and this frees up my mind to flow. Then I feel like a kid who tuned in to some random radio station and is curiously trying to figure out what the broadcast is about.

After the walk I generally feel refreshed and ready to take on the rest of my day. My stress level is reduced, I’m happy that I did something that is good for my health and my mind feels (even if a tiny bit) rejuvenated.

I hope that my experience spurs some questions in your mind and maybe even helps you. If it does — I’d happy if you reached it and shared your story with me!

Oh oh — production alarms are ringing and you are on duty. Adrenaline spikes and you rush to your computer to see what is happening — sounds familiar? I’ve been in this situation several times and I want to share some things that I’ve learned so far.

Have an emergency rollback strategy for high-risk deployments

All deployments have different levels of risk. Some are minor bug fixes, some are major DB changes that affect the whole application. Figuring out a process to roll those changes back and return the system to a consistent state is a great exercise to do beforehand. During the incident, it will take considerably more time (since everybody is panicking) and some options might not be possible anymore, e.g. if you dropped a wrong table and you don’t have a backup.

Do not hesitate to involve the support of 3rd party systems

In my experience, most of the production incidents are caused by one of the recent deployments; however, several times one of our 3rd party dependencies (e.g. cloud providers) was at fault. Don’t wait until you are 200% sure that the fault lies outside of your application — if after checking all the potential causes of the issue, relevant logs, and metrics you have at least 80% certainty that the fault lies in a 3rd party system, call their support for help. The best-case scenario is that they will solve the issue, the worst — you get valuable knowledge that the problem is elsewhere.

It is also useful to be aware of the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that you have with these 3rd parties and the support request response times that they guarantee. For the most critical 3rd party integrations, it might be a good idea to have a premium level of support in order to be able to solve critical issues quickly to minimize the effect on your customer base.

Be transparent with the customers & communicate the progress

If an incident takes longer than 10–15minutes to fix, it might be a good idea to notify your customer base. This shows your customers that you are aware of the problem and are actively trying to solve it. It could happen that they do not even know about the issue yet, but it will boost your company’s image to show them that you are diligently observing your product’s health. If the incident is taking even longer to resolve, update your customer base about the progress.

I’ve learned that customers are far more understanding than I had expected.

Appoint a person during the incident resolution to log everything

Investigating more serious/puzzling incidents usually means involving more and more people. The joiners will need to be brought up to speed, and in such high-pressure situations, it is best to avoid wasting precious time explaining things over and over or even worse — having people do something that has already been done. Therefore, as soon as an incident commences, appoint a person to oversee the process and log the following information (with timestamps and outcomes!):

• what has been checked (recent deployments, , metrics, etc);
• what has been tried (redeployments, traffic throttling, etc);
• who is doing what?

This log will also be extremely valuable to identify what parts of the process can be improved and can also be used during the writing of a post mortem.

Learn & improve from the incident

Ask the main participants of the incident to reflect on the incident and then schedule a meeting to discuss what can be improved in terms of monitoring, response, problem investigation, etc. There are probably some improvements that could be introduced in order to avoid these kinds of incidents in the future or minimize the time spent on identifying/fixing the issue.

Most importantly, remember that production incidents are inevitable — keep your calm, do your best and do not be afraid to ask for help.

Production Incidents: 5 Learnings From The Trenches was originally published in Javarevisited on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recently, my teammate and I paired on a task that included matching values from different lists. In the process, I realized that I was not familiar with the Iterable<T>.fold() operation in Kotlin… well, rather my teammate realized that and teased me about it for a while.

Thus, the first thing I did the next morning was opening the for the fold operation!

Setup

There is a Shop that tracks the history of its Customers who have Order ‘s with certain Product ‘s:

The task is: for a given shop get the list of products that were ordered by every customer. And, of course, use the fold function.

Solving the problem with what I already know

My first step was to simply solve the problem — I needed to get the list of orders for each customer and find the intersections of these lists:

The initial mapping of a List <Customer> to List<List<Product>> felt unnecessary, so I removed it. Furthermore, I added a getter to Customer that returned all Product ‘s ordered by that Customer.:

Both of these passed the Koan test, so it was time to use the fold function.

Solving the problem with the fold function

This is how the function is defined:

Great, my initial the value would be the product ordered by the first customer and operation is the same intersect I’ve been using:

Looks very neat and concise! Let’s add a guard for a case when the customer list is empty:

Comparing with the solution

And, finally, the Kotlin academy’s own solution:

Hooray, I was actually quite close! My solution is even a little bit more concise as it does not have the first iteration overall customers to get a list of all purchased products.

I hope you have found this interesting!

How about giving it a try yourself?

Coding Time: Folding Collections in Kotlin was originally published in Javarevisited on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

IntelliJ IDEA is the most popular editor within the JVM community. It is by far my personal favorite and I’ve been using it for many years. In this article, I want to share what helps me to get the most out of IntelliJ in my daily work.

Disclaimer: your shortcuts may differ based on the keymap you’re using — mine is ‘IntelliJ IDEA Classic keymap’ with some customizations.

Re-wire tool windows shortcuts

IntelliJ provides a lot of useful tool windows that allow you to get insights into the project and access/run your whole project ecosystem. I find the default tool windows shortcuts assignment quite good, but I quickly realized that some of them I never used. Therefore I reassigned them:

‘⌘ + 2’ from Favourites to Databases

This one was quite straightforward — I often need to look into different databases, but never actually used the Favourites before… until recently, at least — now I save.http scratch files in Favourites with the HTTP requests that I want to keep, without checking them into the VCS.

‘⌘ + 6’ from Problems to Terminal

The terminal is a must for a software developer, and having a shortcut for it reduces the time I need to switch to it. I’m a big proponent of as few cognitive switches as possible, so having a possibility to access the terminal in my IDE helps me achieve that.

`⌘ + 7` from Structure to Git branches

The projects I work in have a lot of short-lived branches, therefore naturally, there is a lot of switching between branches. My initial approach was to:

• Switch to terminal
• Fetch from origin
• List the branches (usually, you don’t know the branch name by heart)
• Copy the branch name
• Checkout the branch (possibly pull the latest changes as well)
• Switch back to IDE

Having to switch, copy, run different commands, switch again was annoying. I love the VCS plugin in IntelliJ, but its option of having the ‘Git:branch_name’ at the bottom right corner did not appeal to me either. It was time for some customization!

Re-wiring the ⌘+7 shortcut to open the branches gives me an extremely quick overview of all branches with a great filter without having to switch to another tool. I also placed the branches pop-up in the middle of my screen. As a habit, I hit ⌘+T to pull the latest changes after I checkout a branch.

This is also a convenient way to create a new branch:

Quickly access the recently viewed code

IntelliJ memorizes all the code places you’ve visited in the current session. This is extremely useful when you’re jumping from class to class (or place to place), especially in an unfamiliar project.

Use ⌘+E to access the recent files:

And ⌘+⇧+E to access recent locations:

You can configure how many files/locations IntelliJ memorises by going to Preferences — Editor — General — Limits.

In case you want to mark specific code places persistently, try ‘Bookmarks’ (F10 on the line you want to bookmark).

Speed up with multiple cursors (different variations)

Code constantly changes and being able to refactor it quickly is always handy. When working with text changes (for example, editing the same mock verification in all tests within a test class) I’ve been using the replace functionality (⌘+R) quite a bit, but I was always lacking code completion in the replacement input area. ⌘+control+G solves that for me as it selects and places a cursor for all exact matches of the element on which your cursor is standing now, effectively allowing me to edit all of the occurrences at once:

For finer grained control I use control+G, which adds a cursor to the next occurrence only:

You can also place additional cursors in arbitrary places with ⌥+⇧+click (alt/option+shift+click):

Trace down method’s call stack with Call Hierarchy

Let’s say we have a project with quite common server layer architecture and we want to trace which API invocations result in a call to a certain repository method. Before I learnt about Call Hierarchy , I would find all usages of the repository method, pin that tab, and then find usages of the service methods that call that repository method. Complicated, right? With Call Hierarchy (control +⌥+H), IntelliJ does that for you and even allows you to filter further:

I hope you will find these tips useful!

My Favourite IntelliJ Know-Hows was originally published in Javarevisited on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Coming up with creative ideas is difficult when you’re actively trying — did you ever notice this phenomenon? Or how weird is it that great solutions or interesting ideas pop into our brains at the most unexpected times — for example in a shower?

The reason behind it is that our brains operate in different modes. Each of these modes shapes our thinking and mindset in its own way.

While the research about these modes is actively ongoing, it’s been quite clear that there are 2 distinct modes in which our brains operate: let’s call them L-mode and R-mode.

L-mode

L-mode is ‘make it happen’, ‘see it through’, ‘meat and potatoes’ kind of processing mode.

L-mode is our conscious way of operating, and it is quite slow compared to the R-mode, especially in regards to working with memory (ever try to remember that tiny detail that just slips your mind when telling a story?). It is highly rational and follows logic first and foremost.

We form consecutive and linked thoughts and draw conclusions based on reasons, facts and logic through this mode. It allows us to use language and symbols to name, describe, define and denote things and ideas, and to do number operations. The L-mode is our temporal navigator that keeps track of time and sequences things one after another in our conscience. It also helps us describe a whole by breaking it up into smaller parts.

The L-mode enables our day-to-day operations, and gives us the ability to work through the details, to use language and arithmetics, to perceive logic and to make rational decisions.

R-mode

R-mode is ‘I’m just gonna do my thing’, ‘I’m ready when I’m ready’, ‘here is a random idea — might be gold, might be turd’ kind of processing mode. It has a completely different approach compared to L-mode.

The R-mode is a free spirit, running at large somewhere in the background of our conscience. It draws from our experience, knowledge, deep rooted memory, feelings and hunches. The R-mode is subconscious and it works very fast. It is a much better memory search engine than the L-mode. It is sensitive to our focus and mindset and will try to come up with ideas to solve a problem that is bothering us.

The R-mode comes up with a witty response 4 hours after a conversation.

The R-mode powers our intuition, allowing us to make leaps of insight based on fragmented knowledge, hunches, feelings, images. It enables our creativity, generating ideas and allowing our inventiveness to flow. It emphasises holistic view and learning by synthesis — putting pieces together into a whole.

The R-mode is responsible for our intuition (remember professional intuition from the previous article?), creativity, and unorthodox problem solving.

R-mode sees the forest, L-mode sees the trees.

Interaction between the L-mode and the R-mode

There is no direct connection between the 2 processing modes. I imagine them as R-mode being a guy that keeps leaving random notes in L-mode’s post box, and L-mode is then trying to make sense of what R-mode meant. However, if R-mode sees his notes being thrown away as some advertisement trash, he gets sad, goes into a depression and stops leaving notes. L-mode is then left with boring regular mail in his post box, with little to no creativity to work with. I’m certainly guilty of concentrating too much on regular mail and I’m sure that many people can relate to getting used to thinking linearly and disregarding the ideas that come to us and simply keeping our brains occupied by some problems we have.

There is no direct connection between the two processing modes. I imagine their interaction like this: the R-mode is a guy that puts random (creative) notes in the L-mode’s post box, and the L-mode then reads the notes and tries to make sense of them. However, if the R-mode sees his random notes being thrown away as some unwanted trash, he gets sad and depressed and eventually stops leaving any random notes. The L-mode is then left without the creativity of the random notes to work with, with only the regular, boring mail put in his post box.

I am certainly guilty of concentrating too much on the regular mail. I believe many of us can relate to getting used to thinking linearly and to disregarding unexpected ideas that come to us and simply keeping our brains occupied by the everyday problems we have.

made me realise how much of my brain power I am missing out by functioning primarily in the L-mode most of my waking hours. To get the most of our brains, we need to learn how to invigorate and utilise our R-mode processing.

Thankfully, there are ways to help kickstart our R-mode thinking, and that is exactly what we will look at in the future article.

Gain Access to Expert View — 

was originally published in on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A friend of mine saw a part of my desk peppered with post-its and chuckled: ‘Why does a software developer, who is constantly surrounded by different devices, still uses pen and paper to write down his ideas?’ — she said. Writing thoughts and ideas down on paper is an old habit of mine, and I actually tried to move away from it to go completely digital at one point. However, after going without it for several months, I returned to my pen-and-paper approach. Here is why:

Distraction-free

Whenever a random thought/idea pops into my head, I want to simply note it down and quickly go back to what I was doing without losing any concentration. With devices that feels nearly impossible, as there is too much that can grab your attention even if you try to limit it to the minimum.

For example, this is how my lock screen looks most of the time — to limit the distractions, I’ve disabled pretty much all notifications on my phone:

Nonetheless, even on this seemingly empty screen my brain always picks up on two things: current time and battery life.

“Am I on time for today’s schedule? Do I have enough time to do this/that? Do I have enough battery to last until I can charge my phone again? Would 42% be enough for me to listen have a 30-minute Skype call while also using Google Maps?”. Involuntarily, these questions start running through my mind and inevitably end up distracting me, even if for a minute. Furthermore, when I open the ‘Notes’ app, I cannot help but glance at my latest notes, which again hijacks my brain activity.

In contrast, a post-it or a piece of paper is a blank, open canvas that does not cause me any distractions and allows me to simply transfer thoughts from my brain onto paper and resume my ongoing activity.

Limitless format

A blank piece of paper is the ultimate real life app for expressing your ideas — it supports text, drawings, schemes, mind-maps — anything that you’d need. A digital device simply does not have the same convenience yet.

Built-in revision step

Of course, paper notes are not the long-term storage for my ideas — eventually everything that I consider worthy ends up in one of my tools (personal boards / mind maps / lists / etc) somewhere in the cloud. I try to maintain a good level of organisation in my tools, and having to transfer my handwritten notes to one of those tools forces me to re-evaluate the idea again. Is it really a good idea? Does it make sense? Is it feasible? Do I really see myself doing it? This facilitates the first revision of the thought, refining it from its original raw state.

Paper notes eventually end up in the recycle bin, but before they do they help:

• capture an idea without getting distracted from what I am doing;
• evaluate if the idea is worthwhile one more time;
• keep my main working area/tools well-organised.

These reasons were enough for me not to go completely digital in my note-making, but of course it may not be the case for everybody. Two of my most skeptical friends have agreed to try out the pen-and-paper approach for one month. The only rule is that whenever they have an urge to note something down on one of their devices, they use a piece of paper or a post-it instead.

I will share their developments and experience in one of the later articles!

The skills section of the CV has always been a pain for me, specifically the process of rating my skills. Do I put intermediate or do I put novice? If I haven’t practiced a skill in a while, but I was really good at it a year ago, can I still call myself proficient at it?

Discovering the Dreyfus model gave me a very clear guideline on how to rate my skills. It is a widely used skills assessment model, which defines 5 stages of skill mastery, from novice to expert.

Let’s take a closer look at each level.

1. Novice

This is the beginning of the road for everyone. At this stage, we require very precise guidelines/rules on how to achieve what we want and struggle to make heads or tails of what’s going on or how to approach the issue. All we care about is solving our problem, the bigger picture does not cross our mind.

I was once working on synchronising our platform’s users with Intercom. Intercom is a whole ecosystem for customer support, marketing and sales, but I really did not care about all the great features that it provided and all of its possibilities — all I needed and wanted to do was to synchronise users. I learnt just enough to do that and that was it.

2. Advanced Beginner

After getting some bumps and bruises, we gain a better understanding of the rules and have better judgement when to apply them. The big picture still does not bother us, but we start to develop a feel for the context of the situation. We are still driven by the desire to solve our problem as quickly as possible, but the problem and the subject area do not feel as alien anymore.

Going back to the Intercom example, after some time I needed to integrate more events into Intercom. While I was still heavily relying on the documentation and examples, I already had an idea about where to find the information I need and in which direction I should go.

A surprising fact is that most people, for most skills, for most of their lives, never get any higher than this stage, the advanced beginner.

3. Competent

At this stage we develop conceptual models of the subject area and apply those effectively. Our approach becomes much more structured, planned and deliberate. We can troubleshoot problems on our own, and use our experience and knowledge to solve novel problems.

It’s interesting that people of this level are very good at teaching novices and advanced beginners since they can still relate to the approach employed by them. Proficient practitioners and experts use professional feeling or intuition, which makes it more difficult for them to explain their decision-making process.

I rate myself as a competent UI (user interface) developer — I have several years of diverse experience in this area with a solid understanding of UI development and several mainstream frameworks. I can solve any problem I encounter without assistance and in general feel very comfortable developing the UI solution from scratch. However, I might not choose the most efficient approach when solving a problem and would need a more proficient professional to guide me towards the best practices.

4. Proficient

Our experience becomes the primary guide, rather than the guidelines/rules that we used to rely upon before. We understand the context well enough to be able to make predictions or corrections in order to achieve the desired result. Moreover, we can improve our own past performance by reflecting on our approach and revising it for the better. And we absolutely need to grasp the big picture.

In this phase an individual experiences the biggest shift in thinking on their path to mastering a skill.

I consider myself proficient at Java programming language — I have many years of diverse experience with it, and I continue to gain knowledge by observing the latest developments, learning from the experts in the field, and reassessing my work, looking for better ways to do things. However, I do not have any influence on which direction Java is going, nor do I have a significant contribution towards big open source Java ecosystem projects, therefore I do not count myself as an expert.

5. Expert

At this stage we look like magicians to the lower level practitioners. Our professional intuition becomes our main compass. Many actions and responses become second nature, and are usually difficult to explain to others — they just feel right without much contemplation. We have the ability to differentiate between irrelevant and important details, based on the context. Following the rules is actually detrimental to our performance.

We contribute and help shape the big picture by proactively looking for better ways and better solutions.

I strive to become an expert in Java, and I believe I can achieve it by contributing more to open source projects and sharing my experience and knowledge on bigger stages, while continuing to get a lot of hands on experience with it.

From Novice To Expert

There are 3 most important changes that happen when mastering a skill:

1. We move away from strictly adhering to rules to using intuition
2. We improve at perceiving the context and identifying the relevant details
3. We shift from being a distant observer to being a part of the system

The journey to being an expert is quite straightforward — learn about the subject area, keep practicing consistently, get diverse experience. However, before you set out on this journey, wouldn’t it be great to pack the best available tool with you? That tool is knowing how to learn better, which starts with uncovering some of the inner works of our brains.

And that’s what we will focus on in the next article.