I am so glad we started Turing with this Gear-up. Throughout the entire mod I kept on coming back to the lessons here and instead of telling myself I was terrible, I told myself I would learn, I would get there. I've had to become comfortable with being uncomfortable and knowing that there's a process to becoming a great programmer and it doesn't happen overnight.
What I took away most from this session was that the best way to learn something difficult is to learn from a master and immerse yourself in it. This was heartening to me, seeing that I feel this is what I am doing at Turing. It was good knowing that learning difficult things does take time and I don't necessarily need to be a master at it from the beginning. However if I surround myself and jump in the deep end, I might not drown.
I'm an introvert and always internalize everything and it was nice to know from this session that there are strengths to what I do and there are also strengths my extrovets have that will complment what I can do. It was nice to learn about the diversity of my classmates and get advice from people different to me about what I can do to make working with them better.
I hate talking about myself and I rarely do it-- which is why I needed this session more than any of the other ones. It was important for me to embrace telling my story and to work at it until I become comfortable. This will be a challenge for me so I'm glad that I am starting early.
It was important for me to learn about how professional female coders view their work environment and also what can be done to help change things in the industry. I was very glad that these very issues are being brought to light to all students so we can all work to overcome them.
I think that as data gathering becomes more and more valuable to companies privacy will become more and more of an issue. I have to admit that I rarely read through all of the privacy policies on the apps I get – when I do it can be kind of scary. Apps that have no business knowing where I am at want to know my location. Apps that don’t connect me socially with others are getting info on my friends. And all are tracking every movement I make on the app itself.
I feel I’m able to give away some information to use the app – for example if I want to use Google maps, I need to first let Google know exactly where I’m at so I can get directions. However, with all of the spam I get my email is almost sacrosanct and I don’t want any app giving it to anyone else. It goes without saying that I want my financial information to be private as well. I think the biggest problem is that we often don’t know what we are giving away because things are spelled out in such a convoluted form.
When making apps I hope to be as transparent as possible – only take the information we’ll need to make the app work and keep the information to ourselves.