The readings and responses listed here should take you approximately 60 minutes.
To start this assignment, click the button in the upper right-hand corner that says Fork. This is now your copy of this document. Click the Edit button when you're ready to start adding your answers. To save your work, click the green button in the bottom right-hand corner. You can always come back and re-edit your gist.
1. Learning Fluency by Turing alum Sara Simon (30 min)
- Your key take-aways OR how you're going to implement specific points (minimum 3):
- The first main take-away that I have after reading this piece is that not everyone learns the same way and that should be considered a good thing. If everyone learned the same way, had the same sort of mindset, and consequently, programmed the same way, the tech industry and everyone who interacts with it would be worse off. Diversity is extremely important.
- The next key take-away that I have after reading this piece is that entering the tech industry with a non-tech background can be beneficial. I graduated with a B.A. in Journalism and Techical Communication, and like the author, I took classes on representation of minority groups in media and pop culture. Earning a degree in liberal arts taught me not only empathy, context, and creativity, but how to think critically and creatively - on my own and in groups - which I think will benefit me as I launch my career in technology.
- The third main take-away that I have after reading this piece is that learning to program and learning new programming languages is going to be difficult and will require a lot of discipline and effort.
2. How to Google Programming Problems Effectively by Lulu Li (15 min)
- Your key take-aways OR how you're going to implement specific points (minimum 3):
- An important thing I took away from this piece is that Googling problems should not be viewed as a sign of weakness or that you are a bad programmer. Google is a vital resource for programmers and, chances are, someone has probably run into the same issue you are currently facing and the solution to your problem more than likely already exists.
- Another important thing that I took away from this article as well as the second session of Mod 0 is that Google searches should be short and sweet and should comprise of an object, verb, and programming language for optimal results.
- Another thing I took away was that openining multiple tabs can be a helpful way to sift through information. Once you read through the page and don't find what you are looking for, you can close it and move on. If you do happen to find a solution on a page, you can keep that one open and peruse your other open tabs to find additional information without having to try and backtrack and recover a bunch of closed tabs.
3. Do Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently? by Umer Mansoor (10 min)
- Your key take-aways OR how you're going to implement specific points (minimum 2):
- Much like article number two, a key take-away from this article is that Google is an extremely important tool for all developers when they encounter problems. I particularly like the line that experienced programmers often use Google more than beginner programmers do, and that good programmers often live in a state of paranoia about their code, no matter how experienced they are.
- Like my previous career in marketing where I often had to Google how to write a term in AP style, I plan on using Google frequently to not only learn new concepts, but to troubleshoot problems that I encounter, since I am probably not the first person to encounter that specific issue.
4. 20 Google Search Tips to Use Google More Efficiently by Joseph Hindy (15 min)
- Briefly describe (in your own words) each of the tips below AND provide an example of a search that captures the sentiment of the tip
- Tip 2: Using quotations marks around a search term in Google will bring up results with that specific wording. An example of this is "Add solid blue border CSS."
- Tip 3: Using a hyphen in a search term will produce results minus the word after the hyphen. For example, searching "Broncos -football" will bring up results on horses rather than the football team.
- Tip 4: Using a colon in a search will provide results only from a certain site. For example, searching "Peyton Manning site:nfl.com" will produce results on Peyton Manning, but only from NFL.com.
- Tip 9: By utilizing the word "OR" in between multiple search terms, Google will provide results that contain either search term. For example, searching "Dogs OR Cats" will produce pages that contain either dogs or cats.
- Tip 13: By wording searches how they might appear on websites, you can get more reliable results. For example, searching "TV repair" would produce better results than "My TV broke."
- Tip 14: Reducing searches to keywords can help Google produce results with less clutter. For example, searching "Gym near me" is less cumbersome than "Where is the closest gym to my house" and will produce the same, if not better search results.
- Tip 17: Wording search phrases can produce different/better results. For example, you can search "Banana bread recipes" rather than "How do I make banana bread?"
If you have any questions, comments, or confusions from any of the readings that you would an instructor to address, list them below:
Great job, @eoneill23! I like your takeaway from the second article that googling problems should not be a viewed as a sign of weakness or that you are a bad programmer. I still google ALL THE TIME at work after working as a software developer for over a year. I can never remember the differences between shift/unshift or splice/slice in JavaScript. The senior engineers that I work with don't google less often than I do, they just google more efficiently and search for solutions to harder problems. Google is your friend while coding!