We learn and absorb new information all the time and there’s no limit to how much information our brain can store. Our brain is a dynamic tool that changes with new information it assimilates, it will never remain fixed. Isn’t that great?
What I enjoy most about learning is the fact that I never get bored. Every new thing is something exciting to discover and find more about! I often think if I had multiple lives, I would’ve spent them learning and practicing the majority of professions that are out there, to be able to attain a vast pallet of crafts. One life is simply not enough to learn them all!
What motivates me you would ask? I think my curiosity pushes me forward and makes me have a huge thirst for knowledge, be it about any kind of subject I’m interested in, like languages, programming, communication, photography, design, studies about improving your life, cognitive behavioural thinking, to name a few.
Ever since I was a child I liked studying and getting myself immersed in books. I would often participate in school competitions and, more often than not, I would end up amongst the first places, which motivated me to keep doing so. This doesn’t make me an expert in every one of these fields by all means. Having such a broad interest in acquiring different types of aptitudes helps me to:
- adapt better to different situations
- be more open to change
- juggle different skills at the same time
- be eager to find out more and stay informed.
Amongst my past achievements, I would say the biggest one was living, studying, and working in four different countries. Through this, I was exposed to challenging situations and I learned to adapt and change depending on the circumstances I was in. It also made me more culturally aware and more appreciative of the world around us.
Completing a Master’s Degree in Computer Science while being employed represents another one of my realisations as this took a greater effort to finish, especially after taking a longer break from studies. A more recent accomplishment is successfully finishing an advanced language course in Portuguese and adding it to my repertoire of languages including Romanian, English, Spanish, and French. It’s really funny how similar some of these languages are… don’t ask me to speak them all at once though, as I might get them mixed up!
Not forgetting to mention my work achievements either:
- Being the lead developer on several projects.
- Learning new development frameworks since the early days when I joined the studio.
- Building new features and functionalities.
- Tackling challenging problems.
I consider all of these to be huge victories as it reminds me of how much I’ve learned and increased my digital experience.
Learning has transformed my life significantly. It made me grow as a person. I believe you have all heard Einstein’s famous quote “The more I learn, the more I realise how much I don’t know.” This applies to me very well. Through learning, I’ve realised that I can do better every day and that I am prone to make mistakes or not know a lot about a certain subject. But that’s OK because that makes me curious and pushes me forward to want to discover more about what I’m interested in.
And what’s learning for if you’re not willing to share it with others? A day doesn’t pass by where I don’t learn something new in my daily work, be it a new solution to a bug, visualising data via maps and graphs, or finding a really cool development tool that makes life easier. In the studio, we all try to benefit from each other’s skills and share our knowledge so we can learn something new whenever we can – way to go team!
As for my future plans for acquiring more skills and knowledge, I’m hoping to pass my driver’s license exam for which I’m currently learning and practicing, perhaps enroll in photography and design courses, and participate in several webinars about various web aspects. I’m definitely keen on finding out more about front-end tools and frameworks, how to use them and what are their best practices, diving into React as a Javascript framework and start building some fun projects with it.