Mod 0 Session 2 Readings

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):
• The interconnectedness of language. I also appreciate the mix of logic and improvisation (that is one of the reasons that I really enjoyed coding when I started to learn the basics)
• I like the differences of male versus female and the implications of how society raises/rewards these groups. It’s a take I haven’t thought much about (as a white male of privilege)
• I appreciate how important Sara puts the important of practiced skill. I have tried to learn Spanish many times, but have not put in this effort and discipline to have the basics be ‘second nature.’ Having this repeated effect until you have ‘fluency’ is key.
• There will always be days that we’re garbage coders (and that’s okay).

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):
• Setting the time span to 'last year' is a great way to check for recency within a search. That's such a great idea (want to implement)
• The screen shot idea is an interesting one. That could be helpful when looking for videos and such.
• Similar to a different article, I feel like exluding words could be just as important as the words that you decide to search for

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):
• It’s important to use your brainpower for the skills, and not all the tiny bits of information that you won’t necessarily ever memorize (also better correct than guessing and being wrong)
• I appreciate the ‘average of 1 question every 10 lines of code.’ I feel like this is something to strive towards in terms of making this number larger (but that it’s always okay to double check syntax or logic within a program, especially if you don’t use it a lot)

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: By using quotes when searching, you are able to create a search that brings up those words in that exact order. An example of this would be if you found a dog and you want to see if anyone has posted online about it (the dogs name also happens to be killer). You would want to search “Lost Dog Killer” so it uses those words in that order instead of finding “Killer Lost Dog” or any other combination of those words.
• Tip 3: In order to exclude words or content from a search, use the hyphen character before the word. A real world use of this would be Curling the sport, so maybe you would search “Curling -hair”
• Tip 4: Use a colon in order to search a specific website. An example to do this would be searching for a news article and having New York Times be the site that you want ("Best SuperBowl Commerical site:nytimes.com")
• Tip 9: This tip is for searching multiple words or phrases at once. An example would be if the Arizona Cardinals are playing the Denver Broncos and you could search "Denver Broncos" OR "Arizona Cardinals" to find the game (probably not the most efficient with my specific example, but I think that's the gist of the ability of this search).
• Tip 13: It's important whenever searching something to use the terminology that the website or people in the industry would use. For example, if you're looking up the notes for a guitar, you want to use phrases like "guitar tabs for song" as opposed to a piano you would want to use something like "piano chords" or "piano sheet music for song"
• Tip 14: The name of the game with this tip is to only use words that matter. It's not about writing our a full sentence, but just the key words. Instead of saying "I would like coffee, where should I get that?" you could just type in "coffee nearby"
• Tip 17: This one seems nuanced, but also seems to go along similar lines of using descriptive words that cannot be misconstrued to have other meanings (the life hack versus just using hack). Another way to think about it would be to not use idioms as well.

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. In terms of Book recommendations, I want to read the Letters to a Young Chef after reading Sara’s article. What other books would you recommend before Turing (I’ll have some time over the summer before 1908).

Good job, @nicknist! One book that a lot of people like is The Growth Mindset by Carol Dweck. I'll ask the other instructors if they have any recommendations too :).