I've learned about abbreviations since grade 6, when my actual pickup of English-the-language, though late, began. However, it was not earlier than the first working day of 2020, a Monday January 6 I recall, when one term, four capital letters, separated by one backslash, shifted my whole perspective over the course at which any processes of business development should be conducted.
"CI/CD". I googled it after one brief explanation given by a lead software engineer of the team I was interning in. It was a menu tab header on our Gitlab's project. An abbreviation is standing on a par with other literal terms in technical development such as "analytics", "repository", "deployments" and several other key sections, hence my curiosity. Deducing much from the basis of common parallel grammatical structure, this "CI/CD" thing must stand for some cardinal concept, with deeper meaning entailing it, rather than just what I was instructed with, per se "a tab you clicked in, to compile what we've coded, to test and see if the application matches the business requirement".
And it took less than three mouse clicks for me to grasp the fact that this abbreviation incurs a whole concept. Continuous Integration/Continuous Development is its full-form. CI/CD is indeed a mindset, a practice, being widely applied in modern day software engineering, branches roots from the Japanese ways of building and maintaining factorial operations, in their early years of industrial revolution.
It strikes me until today, about how an early coined development concept still applies beyond finesse given all rocketing technical changes that signify our 4.0 era, already setting aside its firm stance amongst the day-to-day upgrades that make the name of the technology & science industry itself. It also hits me that those quoted lines 2 paragraph above, is the closest, simplest, yet borderline explanation that my senior tech lead could have possibly laid out for a day-one business analyst intern, or in another word, a complete tech outsider, that works.
Speaking of the explanation I was given, it was a fitting and sufficient one regarding my role, as it enables me to do tasks within my scope, hence my contentment with it. Speaking a bit further in terms of how I myself usually handle novelty in life, I demand a deeper understanding from the root. And I was simply happy to have made those extra clicks, to figure out the meaning behind those letters, as the term itself, and the incident it is involved with, paved ways for my two most significant pickups I've gained after almost 3 years of official parting from a baseline K-16 education.
My first pickup circulates around "CI/CD as a global mindset". The adjective "global" I am referring to does not bear restriction to only geographical respect within the scope of that sentence. The mindset of continuity, integration and progressiveness should be prioritized and well embraced in every working section regardless of forms and fields, ranging from governance to the lowest level execution. As long as the sector functions around the core of development, the concept would well works.
This mindset somehow relies with the famous quote "Done is better than perfect", in the aspect that there exists different scopes and varying expectations for any definition of done. In another word, versing the scope a bit differently would determine the outcome and quality of the process, that a draft being done opens up the chance for a finetune being on the road, which would do the same for at least one, not to mention several upgrades being under debut. Smaller slices and a different perspective for development allow for more potentials than an one-on-one draft-to-prototype approach. Indeed, the adoption of "CI/CD" embraces the more realistic and workable aspect of project development. As it is impossible to define perfection, we'd rather work our way to the asymptotic.
With that being said, I have alongside noticed the importance of different approaches surrounding the perpetual acquisition to application of knowledge as my second pickup. We learn lifelong, but the process of learning is by no means the same at different paces, ages, settings, and subject matters. It took me only four months interning at my current company, but a double of the time additionally to fully emerge and feel negotiable with myself in the completely new field of financial technology with regard to my full-on business administration background.
As a field changer, I do not have the native advantages of common learners, in which one is led from theory to practice, from university to corporate pathways. The new norms for me in the previous months were the patterns starting from the assignment of some foreign tasks, to doing, to self-taught concepts, to comprehension and finally gradual improvement. This procedure of learning was alien to the last-year me, who was so fluent at the traditional teaching and raising practice dominant in previous schooling that the adoption of another methodology requires a lot of time, outright change of mindspace, realization and even acceptance. Considering the journey of full-time occupation that I've taken on, alongside with my part-time involvement with education-related side projects, it strikes me on the idea of how best to globalize the practice of learning how to learn before any actual sit-down for theoretical concepts.
Two year deep into the field of financial technology, five year working with educational SME, coupled with some realization brought up by the school of work & life, I became and listened to the inner bell that rings for further education. Specifically, I aim for an MBA with a hope for a scaling of my own capacity, likewise the scaling of my productive value for any businesses.
This personal statement of mine, also being my application for the British University Vietnam's Master of Business Administration Scholarship Program, is the finest portrait of the current version of myself, with self-perceived traits and deeds. I aim to dive further in technology via work, and business via education, to bolster my foundation of a dream establishment of an edTech platform in distant years to come.
Inside out speaking, I earnestly long for the chance of being granted the Institution's Honor Scholarship, as the scholarship would lift off a great part of the financial responsibility I encounter while enrolling for the program. Being a junior with 2-year experience at my profession, I am not yet reaching the state of being financially capable to completely afford an international quality MBA program given the local emolument rate. Having expressed so, I do sincerely hope that my quality as a candidate would be considered as the plus that meets the high-bar criteria set out for honored grantees.
As usual and always, I long hold the belief that even the slightest inquisitivity does wonders in life. As perspective is the accelerator of one's life, I am truly grateful for an opportunity to broaden my horizon and expand my ability under the umbrella of British University Vietnam. I myself welcome all kinds of novelty, and genuinely long for contributing to any organization I am associated with. Upon writing this final sentence, I am already sketching out several incidents in which my aptitude for technology, coupled with further business knowledge on the way, tripled with an incessant interest in pedagogy would be able to bring value to British University Vietnam and your circulating operations.