t-laird

Thomas Laird - Feedback II Reflection

1. Date of feedback conversation:

10/16/2017

2. How did you prepare for the conversation?

I prepared for this feedback session by first thinking about how I might give this criticism in a written medium and also my imagining how that criticsm might then be perceived by my partner.

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Description of the role you played in your pair/group projects this module -- what was your role as a teammate? How did you utilize your strengths and leadership skills?

In my pair projects this mod, I typically took a leadership role on the project. My primary focus during these projects were maintaining a positive and productive relationship with my partners. I think that I effectively used my relationship related strengths (via strengthsfinder) to find common ground when necessary and to deploy empathy and understanding at times. These strengths allowed me to build a rapport with partners which persisted throughout those projects and hopefully beyond. Despite feeling the need to pair with my partners early and often throughout the project, I still feel that I found the necessary time to work alone. This is particularly important because I'm at my most effective and efficient when I can be alone and in a quiet environment. This is important as well because it takes advantage to my strengths in executi

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Mod Two Career Development

How have you used agile as a process at Turing and what kind of project management tools have you utilized?

Address these questions:

1. What were you already doing?
2. What did you put into place in Module Two?
3. What was effective?
4. What do you want to improve on in future projects?

During my time at Turing I have never explicity set out to use agile practices in the organization and execution of my projects. Despite this, there have been a number of circumstances in which I have employed agile practices in order to help aid in achieving the goals set out in the project. Starting in mod 1, I always placed an emphasis on face to face communication and simplifying the project and the accessory tasks that go along with it. In mod two, I've continued to prioritize those principles. Additionally, I have tried to always maintain the 'pace' at which I'm working in order to both maximize the amount of work I do in a specific period of time, but also to ensure that I will

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Reset v. Normalize CSS Files & Idiomatic CSS

What are the differences between Reset v. Normalize files and when/why would they matter to us as FE Devs?

Reset files wipe out all of the styling provided to HTML elements by browser default. Normalize files help make browser defaults more consistent without losing default styles. Both of these file types are important as they help to develop effectively for a variety of different browsers which otherwise need significant and frequent differentiations to be made in order to ensure that styles are applied consistently. Example of Normalize VS Reset

Who are the creators of normalize and why should we care?

Normalize.css was created by Nicolas Gallagher and Jon Neal based upon their research regarding the differences between default browser styles. Their work and thought process is highly respected amongst web-designers which has lead to broad implmentation on a variety of websites. Nicolas Gallagher

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Strengths & Storytelling Reflection

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?

My strengths were harmony, restorative, empathy, deliberative and consistency. I found that these strenghts accurately reflected my view of myself. Harmony, restorative, empathy and even consistency all share the common theme of taking a cautious and thoughtful approach to dealing with people. I believe that this philosophy is something that I carry with me into all situations and regardless of who I'm dealing with. Strengthsfinder has allowed me to effectively confirm that these are my strengths. One of the challenges as I see it is to take these strenghts and a

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Project: Linked Lists

Group Member Names: Thomas Laird - Maria St. Louis-Sanchez

Project Expectations: What does each group member hope to get out of this project? Making sure we're both understanding all the technical concepts that go into the creation of our project. Solidifying HTML, CSS, Javascript and jQuery concepts. Learn how to be an effective group for a project of this type.

Goals and expectations:

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StrengthsFinder Reflection

Slides for this session

Objectives

• Understand what constitutes a strength
• Understand how to develop a strength
• Reflect on StrengthsFinder results
• Create goals for your professional development at Turing

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Responses to questions from 'Developing Mindsets to Succeed'

29 Behaviors That Will Make You an Unstoppable Programmer

Pick out 3 behaviors that resonate with you in the list and describe why they resonate with you in a reflection.

1. Understand that "code is cheap." This point is interesting to me because beyond its relevance in coding applications, acknowledging that an approach you have invested a lot of time should be scrapped in favor of a new one can be very difficult to do. Its difficult to overcome your pride given that you have to acknowledge you've wasted your time in a sense, but being able to pivot towards a better strategy can be very valuable.
2. Become a power-user of your development tools. **While working in finance I did a lot of work in various microsoft applications. I gradually was able to pick up a number of keyboard shortcuts which dramatically improved my efficiency in the long run. When I would stand over someone's shoulder to work on a different task I was frequentl

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Day 1 Ramp-Up

Questions from Chapters 1 and 2.

1. On a website, what is the purpose of HTML code? HTML is used to build and structure web pages as they are eventually seen in the browser.
2. What is the difference between an element and a tag? An element consists of everything from the start of one tag to the end of another. Tags go at the beginning and sometimes end of an element but do not include the content inbetween.
3. Why do we use attributes in HTML elements? Attributes can specify more information about elements in the first tag.
4. Describe the purpose of the head, title, and body HTML elements. The head tag precedes the description some of the style and title features of the web page. The title tag names the web page which is referenced in the title of the tab, default bookmark title and search engine results. Body defines the HTML document's body wherein content will be placed.
5. In your browser (Chrome), how do you view the source of a website? **Right clicking