I realised that I had not posted for a while, so this will be a quick post just to reflect on the week so far. I have been working on a post on Big O notation, but I ended up falling down a bit of a rabbit hole. I realised that what I do know about Big O is only really scratching the surface, and I wanted to really try to understand more about time complexity before posting it. So this is an intermediatory check in.

I’ve been pairing all week, which has been great. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy pairing, and also how tiring it can be. Pairing also makes me think about communication. Sometimes I found that I couldn’t articulate a problem or an idea as well as I wanted to, which is something I really want to work on. The most efficient way to get help is to ask the right question. I’ve been on both sides of this. After I finished Makers I worked as an Alumni Helper, the first port of call for any of the students who had a problem. It was so much easier to help someone who would come up and explain their problem well, rather than someone who just said it wasn’t working, and during that process I really tried to work on my own articulation of problems, because I know asking the right question, in the right way, gets me to a solution faster. I feel like I have lost this a little, and I need to continue to work on it.

Otherwise the week has been going well. I feel that I have learnt a lot about play and using jars, which I know is going to help me when I get back to Tic Tac Toe.

We also had a really interesting Q&A with a craftsman this morning, and I think the most important thing I’m going to take away is to cut out the noise. I have a real tendency to get over excited about all the new things I’m introduced to and all the fun things I can learn, and I immediatly want to start learning about them. As much as I think it’s important to have broad knowledge, I’ll learn better if I focus on one topic and try to exhaust it before moving on to something else.

I think I’ve decided what I would like that topic to be. I’m really interested in CS, and would like to learn more about it. One of the key things I’ve learnt at 8th Light is to use your tools to the best of your advantage, but what if I don’t understand my tools? Because at the moment, I don’t. I don’t really know what a computer is, or how it works. Before the Data Structures and Algorithms course I’d never heard of Big O Notation, didn’t know what an algorithm actually is, and I want to go deeper. I want to understand what’s happening when I write code.

I don’t know if learning about these things will make me a better programmer. I hope so, but I also feel that it’s been at the back of my mind for a while, and if I don’t indulge myself, it will continue to be in the back of my mind and I won’t focus on my other projects. There are, of course, other things I want to learn. I think Machine Learning is really interesting, I really want to learn a low level language and was enjoying researching rust, I think swift is interesting, I want to learn about DevOps. I am surrounded by people who know so much about so many things, everyday I hear something new that I want to learn about. I have to keep reminding myself that I do have the rest of my life to research these things, and I also have to remind myself that I will never know everything. So from now on, in my waza time and my free time, I’m going to focus on computer science and learn as much as I can until I feel that I know enough to move on.