Growing as a Software Developer
Understanding the Growth Mindset
For the past two weeks, I have been trying to coin a phrase for the overwhelming phenomenon I experienced, the emotions accompanying this phenomenon has been a mixed variety of excitement, exhaustion and adventure. Today at the Andela Bootcamp Day 1, I finally found the perfect name for this phenomenon. It is called The Growth Mindset.
What is a Growth Mindset or what does it mean for an individual to have a Growth Mindset?
An individual with a Growth Mindset recognizes that the skill deficits they have are not a limitation but an opportunity for growth. For such individuals, there’s always a demonstration of eagerness and willingness to leverage on the resources around them in order to develop holistically — Andela.
As a Software Developer, having a Growth Mindset is the ultimate skill to have a progressive career in the ever-evolving field of Software Development. Tools change, technologies change, we adopt new programming languages, we are immersed in different physical and virtual environments e.t.c. The difficult question remains — How do we adapt to these numerous changes? And the ultimate answer remains— Developing A Growth Mindset.
Prior to the first 2-weeks of the Andela Bootcamp, concepts like Agile Development, Test Driven Development, Unit Testing, Continuous Integration, Build Processes and Automated Deployments were concepts I only read on tech blogs and websites. Tools like Travis CI, Coveralls, Mocha, Code Climate were all alien jargon to me. It was challenging because I was leaving my comfort zone, venturing into unfamiliar territories and trying new things I never had any idea of, but it’s been fun looking back now and seeing how much I have progressed, from knowing nothing at all, to not only understanding these tools and concepts but also fusing them together in a Software Development process.
How to adopt a Growth Mindset
If my short story above excites you, then you definitely need to understand how to adopt a Growth Mindset and why it is important.
- Identify and understand your challenges: New changes come with their own challenges. These changes could range from using a new framework or library to working in a new team with different teammates. When we are introduced to these changes especially those that tend to take us away from our comfort zone, we might try to repulse that change but the ideology behind the Growth Mindset suggests that we try to identify and understand the challenges. This avails us the flexibility to handle and manage the situation better and makes seeking solution easier.
- Look for a solution: While the challenge is still unsolved, there’s a block in our progress, we become stunted growth wise. The first step to take is to try and seek solutions from our immediate environment, leveraging any resources we can find e.g. For a new library we find difficult to use, try to read the documentation of that extensively, search StackOverflow, talk to other teammates, reach out to other individuals who might have worked with that tool or a similar tool. The goal is to ensure that we are unblocked.
- Reflect on feedback: The end goal of finding a solution to our challenge is getting a feedback. This feedback is what we finally implement to solve our challenges and unblock ourselves, but before we actually go ahead to implement the feedback, we have to reflect on the feedback. Reflecting on the feedback we receive ensures that the solution we want to implement would be a good fit for the challenge we are currently facing.
- Implement the feedback: Once we realize that the feedback we received is a good fit for our challenge, then we go to integrate to unblock ourselves. This stage could also lead to newer challenges, then we re-iterate and start from the from the first step.
Conclusion
While this article focuses majorly on Software Development, the Growth Mindset could be applied to different parts of our lives and activities irrespective of what or where we find ourselves.
The Growth Mindset might seem daunting at first, but it is a process that focuses on your growth as an individual because, with the Growth Mindset, we are ensured of being immersed in a continuous learning process.
