The biggest lesson I learned from reading "29 Behaviors that Will Make you an Unstoppable Programmer" was to hesitate less when I begin working on a project. Regardless of the project, I have a tendency to be intimidated by the blank page, and sometimes I allow this fear of doing something wrong prevent me from doing anything at all. The advice to "understand that code is cheap" and "move fast and break things" made me realize that it is more important to try something that I know isn't perfect than wait for the perfect idea to strike. I also enjoyed the reminder to "absorb massive criticism with ease." Although I have always taken criticism into account in the past, I have taken it too personally at times and allowed it to discourage me when it was only meant to be constructive. I have been working on taking critiques less personally, and it was good to be reminded that criticism is valuable to everyone.
I love using checklists. I find that they not only prevent me from forgetting important steps or details but also that they give my brain more "breathing room." When I am involved in a particular task, I often get flashes of thought about what I should be doing next as my brain tries to jump ahead and start solving the next problem. Writing these flashes of thought down on a checklist allows my thoughts to concentrate on the task at hand, confident that I will remember everything else later. As a student at Turing and later as a professional developer, checklists can not only help me with time management and remembering what to do in a given day, but can also help me focus on one thing at a time. If I think of something I need to do after school, I can write it on a separate checklist and then concentrate on programming until I leave for the day.
My first impression of strengths-based development is that it makes sense. As a teacher, I observed that my students approached the same problem in different ways depending on their strengths and their ways of thinking. I feel that my top strengths are empathy and logical problem-solving. I know that I am empathetic because I work hard to understand what other people are feeling and why they may be acting in a certain way, and I make sure to listen when people speak. I know that I have good logic skills because I can feel my brain sliding into place when a solution to a problem lines up and suddenly things make sense. For my new career in software development, I hope to develop my logical thinking skills to apply them to programming and to develop my empathy skills to apply them to creating a good user experience and working well with a team.