Reflections for Task D of Prework

mindsets_to_succeed-reflections.md

1. What first got my attention in the article was Ruby on Rails Checklist. More specificaly, number 5, add puts statements in code to reveal more transparancy. This is huge in programming and many times I find myself bruteforcing my way through an issue, AKA trying a multitude of different things until it works. Printing out key variables to the terminal is key in being a succesful programmer. The Power of 10 is also an excellent way of finding more than one way to do something and gather a conensus of knowledge about how to do something. Lastly, the Don't Eat Junk stood out to me as well, as I had never thought of it the way as they phrased it: the calories we put in our body are the calories our brain uses. Very logical when you think about it.

2. In the interview Atul Gawande makes the statement that as humans, we are inherently fallible. He goes on to discuss the apprehensiveness experienced by medical professionals when asked to create/follow a checklist as they believe it's all just common knowledge; they do and know all of what is on the checklist already. However Gawande then informs us that when the professionals were asked if they would like a checklist to be used on them whilst they were the ones being operated on (an excellent example ofempathy) an astonishing 94% said yes. Due to the fact that as humans we are very capable of making mistakes, it is safe to assume that we will eventually make a mistake. With a checklist it makes making these mistakes near impossible, as we are following an outlined and well established procedure each and every time. As a student, a checklist is invaluable to the process of committing certain methods to memory. This goes on to teach us how to learn and think like a developer. Even as an expert, we are still vulnerable to making mistakes. As a full time developer a checklist (be it a physical one or merely one that has been rigorously committed to memory) outlines protocol. and protocol leads to far fewer mistakes.

3. The first behavior that noticably resonated with me was the first, Use Google very agressively. In my life I've grown into the role as all of my friends and family's goto IT person when they experience difficulties with a piece of technology. They think I know how to deal with any possible problem that arises because I've dealt with it before; alas that is far from the truth (however after troubleshooting succesfully once, I usually know how to recreate the solution again). I simply know how to use Google! Almost any error code or troubleshooting is well documented and can easily be found online assuming one knows how to take advantage of Google's search engine. Next, number three, Acknowledge that micro-decisions matter, discusses that expert programmers already have a pattern and protocol in place for naming variables, making the process of creating variables smooth, fast, and effective. Creating these kind of patterns contributes to ingraining proper programming ettiquete into students who have yet to develop these patterns. Finally the concept of Always us[ing] the right tool for the job is extremely important. Being able to utilize open source libraries allows a developer to create a more effective program and further teaches the developer how to research documentation and learn new ways of approaching a problem on their own. During my senior year of high school I wrote an extensive Twitter metadata gatherer/bot for the district science fair and used several very well documented open source libraries for data manipulation as well as data scraping.