The readings and responses listed here should take you approximately 60 minutes.
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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):
- A deeper understanding of learning to read and write code can be obtained by fully immersing oneself in the language to not only learn definitions and grammar, but context and overall patterns and reasoning. Project based learning is far more effective than learning the definitions and syntax.
- Having a background theatre (costuming for me) will not affect my ability to become a developer, it will actually help me with better app and web development due to empathy, improvisation, and the ability to meet insane deadlines :D
- I need to establish a flash card or writing warm-up/study time every day. Being a visual/creative person, I need to shake up the study methods I use so that I do not get bored. I also need to increase my accountability.
2. How to Use Google to Solve Your Programming Questions by Florian (15 min)
- Your key take-aways OR how you're going to implement specific points (minimum 3):
- Narrowing the timespan in the tools menu under the search box to get more recent and therefore accurate/relevant results. If the search results are too limited, adjust the timespan again. Tech changes rapidly, an article from 2015 may or may not be of any use.
- Using an image search to find relevant articles with picture examples. Helps when you are not sure what something is called/referred to as.
- Searching with quotation marks makes a huge difference in search results. The entire search doesn't need to be in quotes, but it narrows results to which contain that exact phrase and might contain the phrase you didn't put between quotes. Avoid putting code strings in that have file names or names you named yourself, for that further limits your search results to links where others just happened to also name their files similarly to you.
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):
- When I don't know how to do something, there is nothing wrong with asking the internet for answers. Developers share all the time and are constantly learning more by utilizing their resources.
- I need to focus in on wording my searches as efficiently and effectively as possible. I am aware of various refining tactics through the search results, but not as good with the terms I type in the search bar.
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: Use quotes - Without quotes, Google searches for all the words independently, not necessarily as a set of words. Quotes tells Google to look for those words all together in the results.
- Tip 3: Subtract content from search results with hyphen - The article gives an example of searching for " Mustang -cars " so the search results will hopefully provide more links regarding horses than cars.
- Tip 4: Using a colon to search for certain sites - Say I read a satirical article about emissions stats a few months back, and all I can remember is that it was an Onion article, I could search Emissions Stats site:theonion.com
- Tip 9: Searching for multiple words and phrases at once by using OR. "Best ice cream shops in Denver" OR "Denver's best ice cream shops". Border collie OR collie. Quotes not necessary.
- Tip 13: Use more professional terminology when searching, web titles and article content is normally proper compared to conversational
- Tip 14: Cut down on unnecessary words - More words in the search takes Google longer to find results. Simplifying increases search result time and number of search results.
- Tip 17: Use descriptive words - Shake up the terminology used in the Google search to be as descriptive as possible, look for synonyms that are more succinct, search results vary on terminology.
If you have any questions, comments, or confusions from any of the readings that you would an instructor to address, list them below:
Good job, @vrandall66!