I'm very good at imagining and designing a thing and seeing what it would look like, how it would work, and the steps I'd need to make it a reality. The creative process is something very familiar to me, and I always love getting sucked into it. I'd say that's my greatest strength, that I can imagine something and know what I need to do to get that to work.
I work best when I have an idea and a quiet space to work on getting that idea out of my mind. Usually this means putting on some music and letting myself go for anywhere from a couple of minutes to hours until I have what I'd imagined. When I can do this, I produce some of my best work. If I cannot, however, I generally an't focus and I end up either procrastinating or producing very low quality ideas and work.
I used to be incredibly laid back and have little to no work ethic. I've since grown to learn that I cannot have that kind of attitude, especially towards software developemtn, because it takes immense amounts of work in order to do the things that are necessary. I now have a work ethic that allows me to sit down, bust out the work, and then get up and go home. I'm proud of the fact that I've grown that much, and I think that's been my greatest improvement.
It's incredibly useful to be creative when you're a software developer, as I've found out. You have to not only solve problems logically, but also find ans sometimes even make those problems yourself. It's not an easy thing. My strengths will prove to be useful in this new career because the imagination and creativity I have are both something that are going to be necessary. Along with that, the way I learn, which is a more hands-on approach, is also helpful, because knowing a systemm inside and out is something that proves to be incredibly useful when you have to work with it for 8 hours a day.
If I know that I can't focus with distractions, I can take steps in order to eliminate those distractions. If I know how I work on projects, I can use that knowledge to create a step-by-step plan. Knowing these things helps because it means that I work to my strengths, and not how others might work. This will, in turn, help me to produce better quality work, and be able to produce more.
What efforts do you make to manage your learning process? Are these efforts successful? What challenges have inhibited your ability to manage your learning process effectively?
When I want to learn something, I usually sit down and look at tutorials and documentation and work through things until I feel confident to do them on my own. I'll still keep the documentation up and/or any of my examples if I need them (which I often do,) but it usually comes to me after some practice. The only challenges I've really faced are when I can't find any good tutorials or when the documentation is lacking. As an example, about a year ago I decided to learn a new game engine, but found that all the tutorials available were only focused on one half of it, when I wanted to learn about the other half. However, after some time, new tutorials and better documentation became available for it, and I'm happy to say I can now work confidently in that engine.
I think a lot of how I learn can be adapted to the methods described in both texts. The keynote described a type of learning that already lines up pretty well with my learning style, which is to observe, then try. I also do think I have felt like the author did in the article, where they were "stumbling around, but getting better at stumbling." It's very accurate to say I don't really know what half of I do is. I don't know how certain things work, and I just wing it with some lines of code. However, the more I use that code, and the more I see the changes they make, the better off I feel I am.
What role does your emotional state of mind play in your learning? How do your successes and failures at learning affect your emotional state?
If I'm not prepped and ready to learn something, I cannot learn. Period. Sometimes I'll feel like learning, but will have no time to, Other times, I'll have all the time in the world, but will decide to do other things instead of learn. I can choose to force myself to learn, but usually, that doesn't give the best results. My emotions will be affected how you'd basically expect them to be- excited when something works, and I feel like I've gotten it, or frustrated when it doesn't.
Getting into a habit is something that helps me learn well. If I wake up at a certian time every day, go learn something, practice that thing, and then do the same thing the next day, I start to adapt to the change, and I end up doing well for myself. The best way to prepare, then, is to start getting into a routine before Turing, and then keeping that routine after Turing.