It is crazy how one word or one message can have you thinking about everything and everyone. I received one of these messages first thing this morning and was so very surprised. It was from my pair partner for the day after we just had our daily notification of who we are pairing with. This was the message
I had to check she was messaging the right person as if you have been reading along on my journey I have felt far from genius at most of the way. But no, she confirmed I come with great recommendation. WOW!
The hardest thing with being on a completely remote course is the unspoken interactions that don’t happen. Until then, I had no idea how I was being perceived and I actually hadn’t thought about it. Positive reinforcement is definitely nice but truly as I said a few weeks ago I am just being me, undiluted me — I am glad people are enjoying me just being my happy self!
This morning’s Dream Team we spent chatting about our mentors, if we found them useful and if we thought we would sign up to become a mentor. I was talking about my mentoring experiences back at uni and since (Claire, I miss you!) — I think I would like to help the future cohorts, it will also be good for my learning.
Onto a workshop this morning about modelling our new databases into our current planning process. I can’t lie, I was a little distracted but managed to catch up. We had some great discussions in our breakout room with Sean and Anna, I love that we are getting to the level of knowledge that we are able to debate what we are working on. An important concept with software development to remember is that there is no right way to do things, there can be many ways to skin the cat and that is generally what is up for debate.
Lunch came and went and it was time for pairing. Glykeria and I got started and immediately hit it off, it can still be super awkward when you first get on a call to find your rhythm. We spent a good 20 minutes, chatting, getting to know each other and having a laugh.
Although this pairing session was to be a short one as on Wednesdays we have a process workshop at 4.30. We got started on the next challenge and took some rather big steps we thought were correct to get it done and then we got stuck. We took to the Walkthrough and we weren’t wrong but we hadn’t done enough — so we worked through all of our code to get it to progress. It was a lot!
We now have a bookmark manager that will list your bookmarks from your database, allow you to add more and hyperlinks all of them for you to use. It sounds so simple to do, but to build it from scratch while also learning is a lot, this step alone took us just under 2 hours.
Finally, I was off to the process workshop — this workshop is less about what you know and more about the process you take to work through the challenge. I decided this week to film my challenge for some feedback — I will let you know how that goes tomorrow. Generally, it went pretty well, I just need to remember the very basics as they are the easiest to forget when you spend all week working on the more advanced stuff.
All in all a good day, I am loving the energy I am getting from learning, I am excited to learn more and challenge myself further. If you want to support this resident genius (I joke) please feel free to follow me to be kept up to date when I post, give me feedback — apparently I am blissfully unaware and even buy me a coffee, those luxuries are out of my budget now I am not working!
Software and Soca
This blog was fuelled with Caribbean Hot FM on in the background with the awesome DJ on the mic Sir Lancealot. One of my favourite mixes is from Sir Lance, it’s actually legendary — I think I have listened to this mix over 100 times in the 3 years since its been released! Go and enjoy, let me know what you think!
