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Last active March 13, 2017 20:53
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M4 Reflection
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reflection.md

M4 Reflection

Fork this gist and answer these questions to reflect on your learning experiences.

  • What brought you to Turing?

Luck/fate/insert-term-for-cosmic-incident-here. I wound up at an informational session because my partner, Hannah, was interested. I was in a pretty insecure and hollow place after one year of a PhD program, and the Turing tribe resonate with me from the start. I was drawn here because the people seemed smart and not pretentious, and the work seemed meaningful and engaging.

  • Where do you see yourself after Turing?

I want to build software that reduces stress and frustration in peoples' lives. I've found a deep passion for developing quality software. It's a craft for me. I want to be in a position where I can pursue this passion with autonomy and flexibility. Since Hannah has a couple job pursuits out of state, I don't have super particular dreams of where I will end up, but I'm confident that I will find a place that matches my values.

  • From concepts taught in class or your personal learning, what technical concepts do you enjoy exploring most?

I'm lucky in that I've pretty much enjoyed all of it. I'd be just as happy to land a front-end gig as I would a back-end one. In particular, I love: building and consuming API's, refactoring the interface of an app (bringing in PORO's especially), and dream driving a feature.

  • What technical concepts do you enjoy exploring least?

I think my energy is lowest when I'm chasing configuration bugs or when I have to read through bad documentation. I think the exploring itself is fun, but sometimes implementation gets me down if it's not straightforward. I know as a developer I need to get used to bad documentation, and I think I'm definitely better than I was at the start of Mod 3.

  • What technical challenges are the most fun for you to solve?

I LOVE scraping and parsing through data in a JSON response. It's a great pairing of the good old Mod 1 days with broader Mod 3 concepts like API consumption.

I also love refactoring SQL and ActiveRecord queries to be as parsimonious and efficient as possible.

@neight-allen
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Thanks for the thoughtful responses. I want us both to keep these things in mind all module, but here's some initial thoughts:

  • You may start to guide your long term career in the direction of Product Management. It's still sort of a dark arts, by which I mean not many places use "best practices", but it's an emerging role focused on what should be built, instead of just leaving it up to sales, or marketing, or designers. Product Managers who also have a technical background can be very valuable. Not all of them do, and the role rarely requires any programming
  • I've found the best tools for "bad documentation" are things you're probably already doing. First step is google/stack overflow. And then having a good feedback loop is really handy. A way to quickly test assumptions. A little groundwork, like setting up a sandbox you can experiment in, can go a long way.
  • More data/sql incoming

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