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):
One of the key take-aways for me is the idea that Sara Simon explains as practiced skill. The idea that in order to gain fluency or even just a comprehensive understanding of a skill, language, or concept we need continual practice and immersion over time. Within this is the need for patience, as the earlier stages of the process can seem to be slow moving or feel like you are not making much progress. Though in reality, those early stages are the most important for setting yourself up for long term success. that initial time spent using flashcards and memorizing all the terms and concepts - even if you don't fully yet understand their application, will make your progression more fluid when the time comes to dive in deeper.
Doing the same thing over and over again at the time might seem mundane or pointless, but that consistency is what it takes to fully grasp and understand something. I come from a background getting a studio art degree in college with a high interest in art history as well. This article reminds me of how I approached the majority of my art history classes and the methods that I used to memorize. Similarly to her experience memorizing mandarin in art history your memorizing the details of an image, the date, the artist, the social context, the period, the style and more. It goes beyond simple memorization of photo, artist and date to reach a broader context and understanding. The method of making notecards and then splitting them up into groups of 5 - you then memorize 5 to the point where you can cycle through like muscle memory. you then move on the the next 5 until you reach the same point. At this time you then fo through all 10 until you are set on those. Then 5 more then all 15 then 5 more then all 20 and so on. This was an extremely effective method for myself, and lead to a lot of success in art history classes. Art classes have the same approach as well. It's practice and more practice - you draw the same thing over and over again so that a technique becomes second nature and you can then apply it to more complex projects. I can see how this mindset of applied practice in the early stages of learning something is extremely applicabel to web dev and learning to code. This article was definitely helpful in starting to frame my past educational and learning experiences to what we are about to go through at Turing.
I really like her "fluency before understanding" and "discipline before imagination" thoughts as well. Specifically the idea of discipline before imagination. I absolutely agree with this, and as someoone who is attempting to make this career change as a way to find more creative outlets within a career is really good to hear. Before you can alter something in the attempt to make it better you have to fully understand all aspects of what you are altering as well as all other variations of that thing. There is not much creative expression in the grit and grind of learning a technique, skill or language, and it is not until you have reached a level of competency or fluency that you can begin to efficientlly use creative expression to reach your goal. I think the way to implement this is to try and not fill bogged down by the some time repetive or seamingly mundane tasks througbout the earlier stages of learning or the process. To focus on mastering those foundational techniques with your end goal always in sight.

2. How to Use Google to Solve Your Programming Questions by Coding in Flow (15 min)

Your key take-aways OR how you're going to implement specific points (minimum 3):
My biggest take-away and something that I have used before in the past is the use of quotations in Google searches. I knew that if you put text in the quotation then that had to be included in the search results. Hearing his specific use of this definitely helped to frame the best way to use this method. I feel like when I had used this trick in the best I typically put all the text in quotations mark, and his tactic of just putting specific words/phrases in quotations and finding combos of that to be very useful. I imagine that this technique will be the one that I use the most. Also, the tip of never using unique text in quotations makes total since and sounds like somethiong that I totally would do, so that little bit was helpful!
I never knew that putting "-" in front of word would exclude that from all results. I could definitely see how this would be useful if you are trying to avoid certain results and websites. I see this more useful as trying to avoid certain websites if you are trying to targert your results to a certain type. I think this article in its ability to just start thinking about the potential and importance of google searching to be very beneficial. I never give too much thought to the text and formatting of my google searches, so beginning this process and being more deliberate in my searching is a good implementation of this.
Another tip that made a lot of sense to me was the narrowing of the time span on the search results. With something like code and programs that are constantly changing and being updated this tool seems like it would be very helpful at times. You definitely do not want to be using code examples and information that is now outdated, and often it can be a little tricky to tell how old what you are looking at is. So, narrowing that result to find more recent and up-to-date results makes a lot of sense, and is something that I will definitely. I wonder - Is there a universal way to check and see when a web page, blog post, or example was made or last updated?

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):
Don't be afraid to Google search a lot! It is a common and very useful tool, and it should be utilized as such.
Using Google frequently as a tool in programming in no way means that you are incompetent or a poor programmer. It is nearly impossible to memorize all the details and be proficient and all the various languages and frameworks. As a result of that you should not feel less when you rely on the information of others that are proficient in that area. I like the idea of the industry being more collaborative and open-source, we're people are in it together and often have to rely on the work and information that others before them have done. I feel like the more we would use resources like this the more I would also want to contribute to them as a way as paying back the favor.

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: Use quotations "" to narrow the search to results that only contain the text within the quotations in that order.

example: If I am doing a search for weather in Portland, Oregon and do not use any quotations then I will get a lot of results for just weather sites that might not be specific to that place. If I search weather in "portland, oregon" - then all of my results will have weather results specifically for Portland, Oregon.

Tip 3: Use a hyphen "-" to exclude words from a search result.

example: I want to do a google search for boxers, as in someone in a ring with gloves fighting and not the dog. I would search boxer -dog or something along those lines to minimize the results that pull in the breed of dog boxer.

Tip 4: If you are trying to search a specific topic across a specific website then you can add site:nameofsite.com to your search and it will search whatever precedes that within that site.

example: If I wanted information on syntax and I only wanted to see what github had then i could search syntax site:github.com and all of my results would be based on syntax on github.com

Tip 9: You can use - OR - in your search in order to seperate two different bodies of text resulting in searh results for both texts.

Example: I do not know how to make a for loop, and I want to learn both what is used for and also how to make it I could search for both of those at the same time and use OR - why is a "for loop" used in javascript OR how do I make a "for loop" using javascript and my search results would inculde the why and how of for loops on javascript.

Tip 13: Use terminology that is more commonly used on a website. I think a good example of this is rather than searching using a question you can reword it so that is is a statement, which is more common on a website that is explaining something.

example: instead of - why is a "for loop" used in javascript OR how do I make a "for loop" using javascript - I could search - uses of a "for loop" in javascript OR making a "for loop" in Javascript.

Tip 14: Minimize the words used in your search to only contain those that are essential to what you are looking for.

example: Instead of - I want to purchase a used Toyota 4Runner from 1994 - use - used 1944 toyota 4runner for sale

Tip 17: This one seems pretty similar to Tip 14. Make sure that you are using the word that best accurately describes what you are looking for.

example: instead of - How do I get the Uber on my phone - use - downloading uber app on iphone.

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:

adamsjr8576/mod_0_session_2_readings.md