Session 1 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 found Sara's overall argument about the importance of gaining "fluency" through diligent work and rote memorization very persuasive and encouraging, because I had a similar experience to hers of being encouraged to throw myself into a project but running up against the roadblock of not having a deep enough fluency in tech to know what the options were, what the tools were, and thus be able to innovatively put pieces together.
Sara's point that in order to gain fluency a person must go through a period of being uncreative gave me some perspective on the immersive program ahead of me; while the end goal is to be equipped to be innovative, there will be a lot of grindy, hard work between here and there to gain hard skills and the "innate understanding of a system" that Sara suggested is a necessary precursor to creativity. Or as she quoted Barbara Oakley as saying, "discipline before imagination."
The comparison Sara made between the discipline of becoming fluent in spoken languages and becoming fluent in programming languages was a helpful one to me, because I have a background in studying ancient languages and have gone through that process; a related take-away for me is that I'll need to invest time in creating study habits to practice skills and reinforce language acquisition.

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):
It's helpful to begin by reading a wide variety of articles in order to get a general overview informed by multiple perspectives, and to not stop after one introductory article.
It's helpful to narrow the time span when there's the possibility that the feature or topic being searched for might have changed over time, to the last year or even the last month.
Using quotation marks to limit search results to those which include specific words or phrases is helpful in certain instances, but care needs to be taken to avoid including words in those quotation marks which are unique to my situation (such as variable names).
Using the minus symbol before a word can exclude search results which include that word, which can be useful if the top results provide solutions using a method you're trying to avoid using or if there's a particular website you don't want results from.
Overall, the point from this article which was new to me was the emphasis on reading broadly in order to get an idea of how different programmers approached a problem, so that themes can be traced and common approaches identified.

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):
Using Google is not a sign of inexperience or incompetence; rather, experienced progammers use Google even more, though in a specific way. They use it to research, to check their logic, and to review a range of approaches, in addition to looking up things they simply don't know or remember.
It is important to not simply copy the first approach you find, but to review and evaluate the range of options in order to gain an understanding of the topic and possible solutions.

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 quotation marks to limit search results to those which include a specific phrase, i.e. with words all present in a specific order. E.g., searching for "Error code 1934: Memory overflow" (with quotation marks) would be helpful to find articles referencing a specific error code, whereas searching for those words without quotation marks might return results related to other error codes or the topic of memory errors, etc.
Tip 3: Use a hyphen immediately before a word to exclude results which include that word. E.g., searching for "ruby method -jewelry" would exclude results referring to rubies in the context of jewelry and increase the odds of finding results referring to the programming language.
Tip 4: Placing "site:" followed by the URL of a website at the end of a search query limits search results to that website. E.g, if I wanted to search MDN for a phrase I could query Google for "ruby hash site:developer.mozilla.org".
Tip 9: Using the capitalized word "OR" between phrases or words returns search results for either queries, which can be useful if there are two (or more) specific phrases or words being looked for. For example, one could enter "'Microsoft Access' OR 'Microsoft Excel' OR 'Microsoft SQL Exchange'" to look for results related to any of those three phrases.
Tip 13: Using the professional terminology or vocabulary that a website would use, rather than informal or casual language, improves search results. E.g., searching for "my ruby method doesn't work" would be inferior to "ruby method debug error code".
Tip 14: Using only the most important words improves search results. E.g., searching for "why doesn't this ruby class make my object inherit the right behavior" would be improved as "ruby class object inheritance".
Tip 17: Using more descriptive language, or simply different language, helps locate better or simply a wider range of search results. For example, "how to fix Mac terminal error" could be rephrased as "troubleshoot mac terminal" or "diagnostic mac osx terminal".

5. Questions/Comments/Confusions

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

None at this time, thank you!