Learning Journal | Nearsoft Academy | Week 4

4 min readOct 25, 2020

October 19th — October 26th

Hello! 👋 This is my fourth-week takeaways being part of the Nearsoft Academy program, a space to learn, practice, and grow. I’ll post every week, all about the topics I’ve learned during this adventure.

I’m a visual and kinesthetic person, so you will see a lot of sketch notes here, I hope you enjoy them, and also, feel free to share if they were useful for you.

Well, this is what I captured this week:

Everything is about science.

The scientific method is a process to determine if a hypothesis is correct or not, Richar Feymann explained it in an interesting way, the process starts with guessing, then having a hypothesis about something after that, we experiment where we try to approve or disapprove our hypothesis, and finally, we analyze the result and make a conclusion.

Richar Feynman was a really funny, smart, and amazing person, he was an important scientific, remember as a good friend, as someone passionate that loved what he did hoy different people mentions in this videos:

Richard Feynman was intelligent, he had a lot of knowledge and worked on different theories, but the most important thing I learned from him during this week was:

He shared what he thought without any problem, that helped him to become this amazing, loved and iconic person. He was a human, like us.

Black boxes are some electronic artifacts that record everything that happen in a plane, humans are not planes (obviously) but we should start implementing black boxes in our lives.

Matthew Syed mentions in his TEDTalk that talent is not enough, but why? We are not perfect, We fail! Is in our nature, but the important part is not avoiding it, is to learn from it.

We should confront our mistakes and take knowledge from them and keep improving every day, is like a cycle of — trying, fail, learn from it, and try again until you got it — like in…science.

We should start building our own black box and start learning from failure.

Now let’s talk about pretotyping, it is building an idea with the least amount of resources, so you can save time, and money. Also, it gives you more useful data, and we should know that data beats opinion because it has higher credibility than just “talked” ideas.

If we want to make something happen, we should be innovators, who make ideas happen, instead of just think them.

Pretotyping helps a lot to innovators because is a quick and simple way to prove that there are people interested in using the idea, find this way also we can fail fast and fail cheap, so we can iterate quickly the cycle of — guessing, experimenting, and analyzing — like…science…again.

This week I learned a lot about Testing and breaking things.

Testing is a way to assure quality to a system, and there are different ways to implement it, and it doesn’t mean that one will completely replace another one, all of them are useful and it will depend on the specific needs.

The companies use different testing tools, google uses a way that helps their engineers to improve their own experience at testing, that also helps them to test faster and better, the use automated tests but also manual testing, because there is some stuff that needs to be tested by a human. You can see these videos to learn more about it:

And definitely what was the most interesting for me about testing, was chaos engineers, they produce chaos (break things) to build such immunity in a system. They have this philosophy:

Netflix created the Simian Army and the FIT (Failure Injection Testing), their goal is to break things in propose, so their systems will grow and improve with every failure how Kolton Andrus, Chaos Engineer at Netflix, explains in this video.

In testing, they follow a cycle like this:

Ask, What could be wrong?
Create experiments
Fix bugs
Analyze results

So yes, everything is about science.

Learning Journal | Nearsoft Academy | Week 4

Written by Martha Rodríguez

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