What are three new things you have learnt about yourself and your ego due to the core learning?
What are the role of values, empathy, and self-awareness in learning and programming?
Understanding your own values influences our behaviour when we are learning and programming. For example, having a growth value will allow you to seek out answers rather than saying it’s impossible and throwing a hissy fit. If you understand you have a growth value you will know that if you don’t understand something right now, it’s ok. Empathy and self-awareness come hand in hand, you need to look out for others and do things in a way that other will also understand. If we look at our code and we only write code for ourselves no one else is likely to understand it very easily. However, if we write it with the awareness of others looking over it at some point in time, we will see that we change the way we learn and code.
What has surprised you the most about the core learning?
The importance of neuroplasticity and having a growth mindset. These are things that I am trying to use to utilise my potential.
What were the most challenging aspects of the core learning?
I think the parts that didn’t interest me all too much were challenging. These would be the ones I may end up just doing them for the sake of doing them. I end up losing focus and spend longer than I need to because I tend to get distracted.
Why do you think we, a programming school, are spending so much time focusing on core learning in a web development Bootcamp course?
Understanding who we are as a person and the aspects that will help us work with others and grow are important aspects to learning.
Does the time you spent studying core learning here feel like a waste of time? Should you have just used that time to practise programming instead? Justify your answer.
I won’t say that the entirety of the core exercises was a waste of time but yes, I do believe that there were chunks of it where I thought my time should be more focused on coding. The more I code the more that gets stuck in my head and I can feel my focus was dwindling when it came to the core exercises. If the core exercises were once every 2 weeks rather than every week personally, I think I would have benefitted more. This is not a dig to say what is being done is wrong, this is how I personally benefit from learning. I learn by doing practical work for long periods of time. I spent the entire day yesterday coding and at the end of the day I achieved what I set out to do, which was complete the carnival challenges. I felt like I gained quite a bit of experience from the shear number of hours spent coding, debugging, refactoring etc. Then I go to do the core exercises... Every time I finish doing the core exercises and go back to coding, I feel like my mind is blank. For me to have this stuff stick I need to continue to code at every opportunity I can. Unfortunately, that can also mean without interruption in my focus.