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Mod 0 Session 2 Readings
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mod_0_session_2_readings.md

Session 2 Readings and Responses

The readings and responses listed here should take you approximately 60 minutes.

To start this assignment, click the button in the upper right-hand corner that says Fork. This is now your copy of this document. Click the Edit button when you're ready to start adding your answers. To save your work, click the green button in the bottom right-hand corner. You can always come back and re-edit your gist.

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):
  • I have always been similar to Sara in that when someone tells me I can't do something, it motivates me to try harder and prove them wrong. Although this has helped me succeed in life, I feel this instance of my life is not motivated from pure "showing others they are wrong" mentality. For the first time in a while I am doing this purely for myself and that feeling is even more empowering than the feeling gained from showing others they were wrong about me.
  • I enjoyed this quote from the reading: "This level of true understanding, and ability to use that understanding in new situations, comes only with the kind of rigor and familiarity that repetition, memorization, and practice can foster.” Essentially practice makes perfect (although I am a bit of a perfectionist and I never believe anything I do is perfect). But the exciting part of the quote is I truly believe Turing fosters a sense of repitition, memorization and preactice by allowing students to fully immerse themselves in the program. Simply living in a coding environment everyday allows me mentally to implement the constant focus on the material that is necessary for master of coding. Sara makes another point when speaking about her coding skills that struck me: "some days I’m just a garbage developer. We all are." Wow. I hate how I feel when I'm just spewing garbage all day. It is discouraging and makes me rethink why I dedicated so much time to learning this subject when I still make garbage. But I need to flip the switch and recognize that I can improve from failure. Consistency, consistency, consistency will create growth and improvement. I need to stamp this concept on my forehead to remember it everyday and avoid being discouraged.
  • I do not come from a creative background. In fact, most of my education has been so uncreative that I reached outside of my education to find creative ideas so I wasn't so bored inside my own head. This article is the first time I have heard an argument against they trend towards innovtion. "Innovation isn’t just trying something new. It’s when you know something, when you understand something so purely, so innately, so in depth. When you’ve reached its fluency, and you’ve become ready to manipulate it." This new understanding of innovation gives me hope for my creativity. It also sheds light on where true innovation comes from because I was starting to believe that innovation wasn't possible for me.

2. How to Use Google to Solve Your Programming Questions by Florian (15 min)

  • Your key take-aways OR how you're going to implement specific points (minimum 3):
  • One key take away is to read as much documentation as time allows for. In coding there are multiple approaches to the same problem and it'll be to my benefit to see how people's approaches differ and who had the best success. The more I read into different sources, the more likely I'll be able to distinguish the reliable sources from the sources that are less likely to result in successful code. Plus the more you read into different sources, the more comfortable I will be with understanding the concept I am googling rather than just plug and chugging code in hopes that one of them will function as I need.
  • This is something I've already been doing but it is pleasing to see that Florian confirms the power of using image source. A picture is worth 1000 words so why not uses images to search for useful code. Often times I have an idea of what I want to do and what I want my result to look like. So instead of googling for code, google what you want the image to look like and sift through google images to find something similar, then work back to the original code that created that image. This will be very useful in front-end development because many times I'm trying to create a form or button and know what I want it to look like but can't find useful examples in the textbooks or on StackOverflow.
  • Going off the last take-away... I realized that using developer tools in chrome is an excellent resource to see how code should look. For example, if I want to do a contact us form and don't know where to start I can search through webpages with visually appealing forms and then reference their code to see how they set it up. Even though the elements tool won't give me all the code its a great start to understanding the stucture the webpage uses to create a visually appealing form. From there I can go back and reference other sources to more specific tweeks and create a form of my own.

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):
  • I honestly laughed because right before reading this I read Sara's Learning Fluency article. My first thought was "didn't I just read an article fighting that memorization and fluency is key for programming?" However, I thought about the discrepency longer and realized that I am completely wrong (as I often am). Googling is a powerful tool and using it repetitively, while remembering the skills I just learned through Google, is an effective tool to memorize. Often in my life I have memorized material, then not come back to it for a long period of time, and had to Google it to remember it. I can truthfully say learning something a second time is easier and a for a third time even easier. What you are essentially doing is learning the material more in depth!
  • Never have I been asked in an interview "are you a good Googler?". They should really ask that more often becuase Googling material is a useful skill. I like to think of it as being a self teacher, which is a extremely useful skill. Reading other people's code, comments and experience in coding is useful to see how the industry/workforce is solving problems. And maybe one day I can be the one on Stack Overflow answering the noobs questions :) I am going to actively keep track of the types of Google searches that give me the best results and the best resources that answer my questions even if keeping track of means keeping tabs on my browser.

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: Quotes forces Google to find a series of words in the order that you searched them for rather than searching for the words individually. For example "Turing Front-End Ciricullum Module 0" vs "Turing", "Front-End", "Ciricullum", "Module", "0".
  • Tip 3: Use a hyphen to include words from the search. Helpful when searching common things. For example "Apple -computer" won't show iMacs.
  • Tip 4: Use a colon to specify websites to search. For exmaple "HTML images site:StackOverflow.com"
  • Tip 9: Use quotes and the word "OR" to search multiple phrases at once. For examples "How to insert images using HTML" OR "HTML image syntax".
  • Tip 13: Use words in the same syntax a webpage would show them. For example "HTML5 form controls" instead of "How to make a from in HTML".
  • Tip 14: Limit your search and use important words only. For example "CSS3 HSL example" instead of "How to use HSL syntax when using CSS3"
  • Tip 17: You may have to edit the words you use in a search to pinpoint your search. Using descriptive words could help refine your search. For example "inline element HTML" instead of "attribute used to link things in HTML coding language".

5. Questions/Comments/Confusions

If you have any questions, comments, or confusions from any of the readings that you would an instructor to address, list them below:

  1. Can I have Sean Duckett as a mentor ;)
  2. I'm curious who the innovators are in the web development industry. Or who is the industry so diverse that there are innovations coming from everywhere?
  3. Do you believe the learning style taught in Turing translates easily to learning other programming languages on my own?
@katiescruggs
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katiescruggs commented May 9, 2019

Good job, @posi7790!

  1. You can check to see if he's on the mentor list!
  2. There are definitely well-known innovators in the industry. Which ones you know of depends on your area of development. Sandi Metz is super well-known in the Ruby world. For JavaScript, the first person I think of is Dan Abramov, who co-authored Redux and Create React App. And then of course there are other innovators like Linus Torvalds, creator of Rust Graydon Hoare, creator of Clojure Rich Hickey, etc.
  3. I do think that the learning style at Turing translates to learning other programming languages. As you've already seen, there's an emphasis on research skills and how to figure things out on your own at Turing that will help you continue to learn new things on your own. Also, once you understand fundamental concepts to one programming language, many of them translate to other languages (data types, iteration, loops, classes, etc.)

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