I think i've always been a curious person. I like looking at things and trying to figure out how they work. I think that mentality has served me well in my professional life. My problem has been that i seem to get to situations where I'm working places and end up running into a time when there are no more puzzles to solve. I end up stuck and find myself in occupations and positions where I have no advancement or growth opportunity. This is what ultimately drew me to programming. There is a vast amount to learn even just within a single language, and then there are so many more languages to learn.
My brother came to Turing before I did and had such positive things to say about the experience that, when I was looking for a career change, I couldn't help but look into it. What I found there was an opportunity for myself unlike any other I had encountered before: a chance to find fulfilling work in a field that has almost no limit to what I could learn and the direction I could grow.
After Turing, I would lik
What brought me to Turing, in the abstract, was a desire to be more: i wanted to be challenged, to progress beyond where i felt stuck, and to do something more creative in my everyday life. This mod, i've been able to embrace teaching others in ways that i haven't been able to in the past. I find it a personal success that members of my cohort see me as an authority on certain topics and come to me for help and guidance. I feel like i'm still looking for what my role in the tech industry might be in the future. As i progress through the program, i find myself discovering and rediscovering topics and areas that excite me as well as those that terrify me.
I believe that I can communicate well with a large variety of people, which requires a cognitively empathic understanding of where that person comes from. This helps me tailor the message to that person in a way that I believe will be best understood. I terms of working on a team, this is useful to make the team most efficient by helping everyone understand what they are to do and how to do it. In terms of software and programming, this is important because it helps the project's portential of reaching the largest number of people across the intended demographic. Unfortunately, it can be hard sometimes to empathize with people who are not willing to extend the same courtesy to me or others.
https://codepen.io/aithon/pen/VBxBWV?editors=1100#0
The three behaviors that resonate the most with me are number 6: "Understand that Code is Cheap", number 24: "Be Capable of Writing Bad Code", and number 29: "Move Fast and Break Things". This is mostly because they all terrify me. Despite my previous coding experience, I am still terrified of deleting code, restarting projects, and the like. I think it's because I just haven't written enough code yet, but it's something I'm trying to work on. I am also the kind of person who believes that doing something the right way is worth the time expense, no matter what it is. As such, I tend to be the type to do tons of research and get almost nowhere instead of doing something the quick and dirty way and coming back to it later.
The more I think about a checklist in terms of coding, the more interested I am to see how it would apply. This is not a checklist in the sense of "10 things I
Strengths & Storytelling Reflection Guidelines Build on your professional story by thinking about how you're progressing at Turing. Answer the questions below in your own gist to use your StrengthsFinder themes to add to your story:
Write 1-2 paragraphs about your StrengthsFinder themes: How have you seen yourself using these strengths at Turing? Has your understanding of these strengths changed since you first reflected on them? If so, how?
"To be honest, I haven’t thought much about the strengthsFinder themes since we got them all those weeks ago. I think they are accurate—I don’t disagree with any of the insights there. However, I also feel like I know myself well enough to know when I need to sit back and think through a problem (Intellection/Analytical), when I need to do more research (Input), and when I need to be patient and go with the flow (Deliberative/Adaptability).
"I can see, in hind sight, how these strengths have helped me through some difficult days at Turing, but I would be lying if
Introductory Strengths Reflection & Coaching Request
In-Class Reflections Using the Signature Themes Report
Read through the definitions:
What words or phrases stick out to you for each theme?
I've always had a bit of a problem with the concept of empathy vs. sympathy. At some point in my education (I think it may have been that ill-advised trip into Latin in college) I discovered that the difference between empathy and sympathy is in a level of involvement between the subject and the object of the feeling. Empathy is much more involved, going so far as to share the actual feeling of the other person, while sympathy has more to do with simply understanding what the other person is going through. One of those seems like a very slippery slope to me. However, in terms of human-centric design, specifically in designing something that a person might use on daily basis, it seems like empathy might be the better course of study. How else would one person really understand the needs and wants of another without really trying to get in there and see what they see, feel what they feel, and do what they do?
The 29 Behaviors in this article were all of some value, many in life in general and not just in coding. For me, however, there were a couple that stuck out. First, there are #3 and #4: Acknowledge that micro-decisions matter and Acknowledge that major decisions don't matter that much. As a person who is generally terrible at naming things, I find it interesting and a little daunting that naming convention is made so important in this section, but I have also seen first hand how much a single misplaced letter can keep a piece of code from working at all. At the same time, looking at the bigger picture, it's also important to remember that we are not dealing with life and death situations here. It's easy to get caught up in the idea that a single decision can be the be-all and end-all, when really, there is very little that cannot be rethought, reframed, or just thrown away for something better. Finally, #22: Skip a lot of meetings interested me. It seems like the kind of advice that sounds nice in theory bu