Final Thoughts

At the end of this very interesting class, I have to speculate a little to define what I have learnt and what changed in me.
First, I have realized that I miss something. I just spent my entire life reading just technical books. When I was an Electrical Engineering student, it was all about circuits, electrical measurements, ICs, semi-conductor devices ... etc. When I later joined the Communications and Electronics sub-section in the EE department during the last two years of my Bachelor degree, it was all about analog and digital communications, antennae and microwave signals ... etc. When I started working as a telecom engineer after graduation, it was all about GSM, UMTS, network planning and dimensioning, network optimization ... etc. When I finally decided to change my career to software development, now it's all about programming languages, algorithms, computer systems ... etc. All are TECHNICAL knowledge. It is very clear that I didn't spend enough time investing in increasing my knowledge of management and process issues. This course helped me realize my big mistake.
I never before used to stop and think why something I do either works or doesn't. I guess I've been always doing things subconsciously following my knowledge of past experiences that this particular thing should work, while that on the other hand shouldn't. Even during the time of this class and following the projects and assignments we did, without these blog posts or the assignments questions, I would have never stopped and speculate about it. This is something I MUST change about myself. I will never learn quickly from my experience unless I stop every now and then and mine my mind for thoughts and knowledge about my life and work experience.
That's why writing these thoughts and answering the assignments questions can be sometimes a mind burning process for me. The thoughts are there, but they're buried deeply inside my brain and have to be extracted. That's why it takes me a lot of time to put these thoughts into words, because I don't extract them very often.
This course really helped me a lot in closing many of the gaps that I had. And coming from a different field other than software, getting to know these things early on in my career switch phase is much better than learning them by making mistakes later on.