The readings and responses listed here should take you approximately 60 minutes.
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1. Learning Fluency by Turing alum Sara Simon (30 min)
- Your key take-aways OR how you're going to implement specific points (minimum 3):
- Firstly, fluency is achieved by consistency, hard work and repetition. Memorization is a big component to these three ideals and is best applied in an asserted effort of daily routine (such as Sara's summer memorizing pronunciation and meaning using continued repetition and rote memorization).
- Building a strong foundation to build upon is hugely important in the quest for fluency. It also results in strong areas of compartmentalization in which information can be accessed later down the road. Sara found this to be true through her experiences playing chess. Grand Masters have thousands of moves stored in their minds in which they can access to predict a new opponents movements.
- There were two quotes in this essay that really stood out to me, the first being: "study hard, study diligently, and everyday you will see progress" and the second: "the disregard of rote memorization is a failure of imagination." The first I take to be about dicipline and open-mindedness. These two qualities are going to be important in my life during my time at Turing and beyond. Applying these ideas in tandom will lead to the best results, especially with regard to coding as it will be challenging and rewarding as long as propper effort is applied. The second quote is my favorite piece of the whole essay. At first glance, each piece seems contradictory to the other. How can tedious memorization be related to imagination in any way? To me it is referencing the fact that imagination, innovation and creativity are nearly impossible, or, at least, very challenging to achieve without true mastery (fluency). This quote embodies the reason I have enrolled at Turing, I want a new challenge that is hard work, challenging, rewarding and an expression of one's self.
2. How to Google Programming Problems Effectively by Lulu Li (15 min)
- Your key take-aways OR how you're going to implement specific points (minimum 3):
- The most helpful component of this piece is a formula we talked about in Mod 0. Object+ Verb+ Programming language. This formula will be handy for finding information and has already proved to be helpful in the other homework assignments.
- Opening many tabs was another suggestion that will, and has been helpful. It is easy to sift through and re-find information or reference a line of code or explanation.
- Keeping searches specific is also a helpful tip to finding the desired information. Typically this means the less words the better. Along with using trusted resources such as StackOverflow.
3. Do Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently? by Umer Mansoor (10 min)
- Your key take-aways OR how you're going to implement specific points (minimum 2):
- There is no shame in googling frequently. This coder said he made a query roughly 1 time for every 10 lines of code.
- He also suggested the use of trusted sources such as: StackOverflow, Netty 4 Website, GitHub and JavaDocs.
4. 20 Google Search Tips to Use Google More Efficiently by Joseph Hindy (15 min)
- Briefly describe (in your own words) each of the tips below AND provide an example of a search that captures the sentiment of the tip
- Tip 2: This tip suggests the use of "" as it will tell google to search words in that specific order. "dogs eat" vs eat dogs (dont recomend searching eat dogs :()
- Tip 3: The use of a hyphen will eliminate that option from a search. The search Mustang -cars will only result in images of horses or non-car results.
- Tip 4: The use of a colon will filter a search based on a specific website. Googling soccer will result in a huge amount of information but googling soccer:espn.com will result in soccer related information only on ESPN.
- Tip 9: This tip suggests searching multiple words using conjunctinos such as "and" or "or" to search for both sets of results in one go. "Hand and foot"
- Tip 13: Using internet or website diction seemed like a hugely important tip. These are their own languages and using synonoms to search will not achieve the same level of specificity and the proper verbiage. "Ruby array" vs "grouping of info in Ruby"
- Tip 14: Using the important words only will result in a higher yield of success. "how to push an array in Ruby" vs "how do I push an array in Ruby to get an array with a different set of values"
- Tip 17: The suggestion here was to use descriptive words and be resourceful in those choices. "Ruby array drop pseudocode" vs "Plain english explanation of an array drop in Ruby"
If you have any questions, comments, or confusions from any of the readings that you would an instructor to address, list them below:
Great job, @N-Gibson! I like your second takeaway from Sara's article about how grand masters of chess have thousands of moves stored in their minds so they can predict their opponents' moves. Coding is a little like that too. You can store chunks of code in your brain, and then when you are looking at a problem, choose the best option you know of to create a solution.