During 10 years of my professional career, I have been directly involved in system development. I always liked that and I was always happy to see a project get to the market and I always had joy with the challenge that lies daily within this activity. I always liked and I still like the technical stuff. I also think I had a few “Medals of Honor” in this regard. I did things of which I am proud of.
Perhaps because these things worked, one day I was promoted to manager. I had no idea how be a manager and I found out that the technical part was the easiest part of the job. The challenge is and has always been the professional side of the developer. And how would I do that?
Well, I went back and looked at what I did on my start. I remembered that for a long time, I learned by watching others. How they behaved, how they organized and how they could do things. The point was to observe hot the professionals I respected behave. Thus that’s what I used as a basis to help my team: by giving example.
Observation is a great source, but quickly it ceases to be a source new knowledge and becomes a mere tool. Again, I had to look back. I remembered that when I was a newbie, one day I decided that maybe the advice of others serve and, in fact, I was right: this little change made my learning grow a lot when I decided to listen to the advice of those many good people who have crossed my path. And so was born the idea that I had to teach my team with everything that I had learned.
However, during this phase I exhausted everything that I knew and I had to learn more in order to keep helping the team. I looked for literature: I found a lot of good stuff, but widespread. A lot of good stuff that were too advanced: it was good for me, but often I found myself having to translate those concepts into my novice developers language. By bringing together these texts that I wrote to organize my ideas before taking to the team that gave rise to the idea this book.
I offer the “Autodesenvolvimento para Desenvolvedores” (Self-Development for Developers) as my contribution to the Brazilian market development. As my collaboration and thanks to all the professionals I worked with and that somehow helped me to grow, to form opinion and accumulate knowledge. But mainly, I thank all those who have been in a team that coordinated; they were the ones who helped me to grow, to develop and put into practice everything I learned about the “Systems Development Embedded Practice”.
Regards
Ricardo Tafas Jr
