ARTICLE / Lynchburg's Grow-Together Program Evolves
Growing "Growing Together"
Grow Together
Grow Together is a program at Lynchburg that carves out time and space for our consultants to build technical skills and further their careers. Whether alone, at a monthly hackathon, or in a group, we work on the technologies and techniques that excite us, even if we've never used them before. In this post, senior consultant Maria Mihai talks about her impressions of the program, lessons learned and what she'd like to improve.
Ray of Sunshine in a Dark Fall
Grow-Together day was a godsend for me this fall. Other Lynchburgers hear me complaining a lot lately about the gray weather, darkness, and dealing with others' bugs at work [:melt emoji: :sweat emoji: - see issue #3], so having a day to recharge and learn something was gratifying. A lot of what I've been building up to in the last three months has started to click into place and I've already applied what I've learned about hexagonal architecture to services at my assignment :devil fingers x3:.
Give Yourself Time
Our growth days so far have happened on Fridays, but after long weeks at work, let's say it's a little harder to move quickly on your goals. My plan was to practice hexagonal architecture one session, implement neo4j the next and get CI/CD set up on my third day. Yeah, so that was the plan :sweat smile:. I have found that after putting in long days on assignment, it's better to be conservative in how much you plan to get done. Of course, we don't have hard deadlines, but I find it frustrating not to finish what I plan for that grow together session.
Divide and Conquer
Dividing my learning plan into a subject per day went better than I expected. I like to play around with a concept before I try to implement it in a project, so setting aside a topic for each day gave me time to get into it and plan ahead. Plans can change and I like to have freedom to change which topic I learn each day, but ultimately the clarity helped a lot.