Professional Development Pre-Work
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### 29 Behaviors: Reflection

Three behaviors that resonated with me:
* Say “I Don’t Know.”
* Move Fast and Break Things
* Know when it’s time to give back

In my career with the Air Force, my first supervisor taught me the importance of admitting you don't always have the answer
to every question. This allows self-reflection and the ability to focus on getting answers to fill those gaps in your
knowledge. Moving fast and breaking things but more importantly, viewing your failures as *"learnable moments"* is something
that was taught to me by my father when learning how to snowboard. Your first day on the mountain with your feet strapped to
a board will end up with you failing and falling hundreds of times. Frustrated with this, my father simply told me *"You'll
eventually want to not fall down so badly that you will succeed"* and that's exactly what happened. You learn from every failure and the desire to not fail again should motivate you to success. Finally knowing when to give back was something that was a
challenge for me when I first started to supervise younger Airman in the military. I was good at my job and would be able to do most tasks very quickly, but this wasn't helpful to others. I had to *"give back"* and teach my Airman to become as experienced as
I was.

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### Interview with Atul Gawande: Reflection

As I listened to this interview I couldn't help but laugh at how much this related to me. Military LOVE checklists. It shouldn't come as a surprise that an organization that prides itself on order and discipline would love checklists. In my career my job was to handle live explosives and load them onto aircraft, so checklists in my life were 10 fold. Like Atul says in his interview no one like using the checklists but it was amazing how many accidents were prevented by them on a daily basis. Looking back at my past experiences with checklists I more than clearly understand their value in my upcoming months of being a student, time management being one clear benefit at the moment. Going into being a full-time programmer and having so many processes, tasks, and obstacles to overcome it would be impossible to keep track of it all without a checklist.

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### Strengths-Based Development: Reflection

Strength-Based development is very encouraging and I view it as a very successful tool in team-based environments. I have personally seen it used successfully first hand in the military. But one question I do have is how do you overcome the situation where no one's strengths line up with a required task. If I were to judge my own strengths I would say they are interpersonal communication and cohesion in a team environment. There were several times where a spot needed to be filled within a project that was ongoing that my supervisors chose me due to my ability to adapt and work well with others. My hopes for developing my strengths is to use new perspectives and experiences of others around me to foster myself professionally as a developer.