First contact with Collaboration in Pernix — Fabricio Ceciliano
When you first arrive at a company, there are so many questions in your head; “How will I do this?“, “What if I don’t know how to do it?”, “Are my new colleagues ready to help me?” are some of the most common ones.
I was not the exception, as a university student with no experience, I was scared, nervous and with lot of things hanging around in my head because I just couldn’t think on how I will perform if I had to work on a technology that I had never worked on before. But, in Pernix that is not really a problem. As an apprentice, I just started doing the training program, but never stopped thinking what will I do if I had to work with unknown frameworks.
Of course, you will have time to learn about it, your mentor is a very useful resource so I suggest to always stay in contact with them. They will always try to help you and they were also apprentices so they know how you feel and they will do their best so you can complete your tasks. But they don’t know everything, so when you ask for something they don’t know they will refer you to another colleague. I just notice in Pernix it is all about collaboration, in my case, I ask my mentor about Ruby on Rails (which I haven’t worked on before) but that was not his expertise area, so he told me to contact another colleague. I did and just a few moments later I was installing Ruby on Rails to start working on it, and to my surprise, the installation tutorial failed in my computer. I started trying to fix it but just couldn’t get to the fix, so I contacted my colleague again and she was very kind, we got in a meeting so she can help me with the problems I was having. And after many strange errors, we finally reached the goal; I was able to start working on Ruby on Rails.
From that moment, the rest depends on you, you are the one responsible to learn the new syntax, how the Rails framework works, what differences it has with other object-oriented languages like Java or C++. The main difference I noticed was that Ruby on Rails simplifies a lot the crafting process, you can complete tasks faster than in other programming languages. At the beginning it may be difficult to understand what is going on, but if you ask your software mates, I know you will succeed.
Another situation where collaboration in Pernix come out is when you are assigned to a project. The people working on it will be available for you, so you can get in contact with them and the technologies they are using. On my first days, I was assigned to a project in React Native, which I hadn’t work before. I just told a colleague that I will be working on that project so he sent me the link with all the steps necessary to install React Native in my computer and have access to the project code. After that, we had a meeting where he gave me instructions of what I will be doing. But there was another apprentice who was assigned to this project so we did pairing which I can say was very helpful because we were able to complete most of the tasks assigned in a few hours, and that was possible due to collaboration.
I can just say that in the software crafting process there are really important things like having good communication with the clients and with the team members. You also have to be very organized, but those things will never work if you don’t collaborate, as a human being, you are prone to make mistakes and you will, but if you practice collaboration, those mistakes will never be more important than the things you will learn and the experience you will gain thanks to the team work and the help others can get from you and the help that others can give you.
