My first few months in software, I found myself on a team of experts whose
experience was far, far above my head. I was a designer at the time, and I
knew what functions and variables were, but that's about it. Meetings and
standups were uncomfortable, with group conversations in an English dialect I
didn't speak. Wait. I know these words, but I've never heard them used like
this. What makes require different from import and why does it matter? How
does garbage collection relate to software? It was a tower of
Babel situation, and I didn't have the right plugins. Or
know what a plugin was.
If I was going to make it on this team I would have to decode the meetings. And I deeply wanted to make it on this team. I was the lone designer on the software team and had private ambitions of being a full-fledged engineer.
So I started taking notes. Every standup, every meeting, I would scribble down every word of jargon. After work I would look up the terms and try to piece together the puzzle. It wasn't easy, sometimes one term would lead to two or three others I didn't understand. I had no mental model to start from.
I had a breakthrough when I started giving myself side projects so I could get first-hand experience with the tools and terms. Things started taking shape, the puzzle pieces started to fit. Before I knew it I was making larger connections and seeing the bigger picture. I had the beginning of a mental model, a frame I could hang concepts on.
I was able to understand and then contribute to meetings. My code wasn't production-ready yet, but I had a goal and a map I was making up as I went. And now I had a dictionary, all from a few scribbled words.
