Forem: KerushaG

From History to Software Development…

KerushaG — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 19:23:12 +0000

I am 26 years old and this year I found myself signing up for a software development bootcamp. This was surprising to me because I had no prior knowledge, interest or skills related to this discipline. I had an Honours in Historical Studies and I had been the type of person who relied on others to sort out “technical stuff”, whilst I stuck to what I was comfortable handling. In doing so, I equated comfort with natural ability. Anyway, skipping ahead, after 3 months I successfully completed the bootcamp but was affronted with anxiety over what I wanted career wise. The short answer is that I still do not have an answer, but what I did try to do was reconfigure my skills set.

One of the reasons I went into the bootcamp was because I had nothing to lose. I was lost, deflated and confused. I had confined myself to history-related ambitions and took up jobs simply based on current financial needs. I didn’t really know myself to make solid decisions about my future, so I kind of went with the flow and believed my circumstances would determine my future. The bootcamp was the first solid, calculated choice – a risky and pricy one at that – that I had committed to in a long time, hoping it would be an investment in myself. I wanted to use the experience to apply my mind to a skill that was constructive, out of my comfort zone and that would empower me to get somewhere in the job market.

My approach was to be a blank slate – open to learning and free of expectations of what I “naturally” could or could not do. It was an uncomfortable process, but the rewards of progress were enriching enough to keep going. After finishing the bootcamp, I was left with a new sense of confidence and enthusiasm to keep learning – but it didn’t last long. Did this mean I wasted 4 years at university? Would my 3 years of subsequent work experience be for nothing? When I prepared my CV to pursue an internship in the hope of combating the bootcamp with some practical experience, I had to chop out, what at the time felt like, most of my professional experiences, to keep my resume relevant. I felt unsettled, guilty and under pressure to figure out how all my experiences and knowledge could come together as a package.

I knew that the bootcamp improved my ability to think logically, engage in problem-solving with patience, to use software tools and wield programming languages. I became more curious and less fearful. I also realised that I was able to pull on my experiences and skills in the bootcamp and that I was not a completely blank slate. My research skills helped me to search and break down whatever I was stuck on, thereby aiding me in my problem solving. My organization skills helped me track my own learning experience, my progress of comprehension, the hours I spent and when to seek help. My communication skills helped me develop productive relationships with my mentors. I put my critical and analytical thinking to work when trying devise solutions to tasks. My writing helped me nail my documentation practise. Most of all I found myself to be a keen learner and agile in my adaptability – something I’d had practise with before. Through these realisations I understood what made me unique and how my skills could flow fluidly. It was merely a matter of applying them in a different way to unfamiliar tasks.

For anyone considering a change, remember this:

Don’t box yourself
With curiosity and a willingness to grow you can do anything, but it does take time
Skills are fluid

Yes, change is daunting and could make you question everything about yourself, but the reward of discovering something new about yourself and adding to your repertoire of skills is worth the effort.

Accepting Failure As A Teacher

KerushaG — Wed, 01 May 2019 18:57:04 +0000

I am on Day 27 of my bootcamp experience and I’m wrapping up my beginners’ level on python. I’m getting the hang of the process and the struggle it entails, but failure is something I desperately need to adjust my attitude too.

When I face failure, especially when I'm struggling with writing a code to make a program work, I have this desire to throw a fit and the door to my insecurities flings open as despair pours out and I begin questioning my abilities and my intellect, feeling embarrassed like I’m running a race and the whole arena can see me falling behind. I have this stubborn tendency of expecting some degree of successful output, especially if I’ve put in the hours.

For the most part, I lived my life resistant to put in all the small chunks of committed time that creating something requires. If I couldn’t see the immediate tangible outcomes, I’d drag myself through, procrastinate, lose energy and fail. I didn’t grasp that long-term success is the result of short-term persistence. In my desire to learn to program I am willing to drop old habits, perceptions and misconceptions and pretend to be an empty vessel to truly apply myself to this experience, but sometimes I still catch myself with some very non-constructive reactions.

For example, I spent the whole of last week on one task mostly avoiding it. I read an article about how when we tell ourselves we need something to be perfect, it’s just an excuse, and I certainly used that to procrastinate. I also excused myself from facing it head on not because it was too challenging, but because I feared feeling failure. When I finally put it together and sent it to my mentor he suggested another improved addition to make to the code and I was so annoyed - that it wasn’t perfect and that I had to spend more time making it perfect. Talk about conflicting priorities. Turns out working on that improvement granted me the opportunity to spot a few significant errors - I would not have otherwise seen.

Yesterday I spent 3 hours on a task only to realise I read the instructions wrong. So, fuming inside, I tried again. An hour and a half later, I was stuck on a loop trying to make it give me the results I needed. I was angry, because I thought I knew how loops worked, and I didn’t understand why it was taking me so long. When I told my mentor how I felt, he obviously gave me the whole spiel on attitude and all I wanted was the “answer”. Articulating my plan and taking a break to calm down, revitalized me and taking my mentor’s advice, I abandoned the approach I had obsessively tried to use. By the end of the day I had it done. Once again, I was reminded of the difference that attitude makes to the process.

To having the right attitude means keeping the break on the negative feelings; frustration, insecurity, impatience, irritation and entitlement. Another article I found useful was one on steps to follow before you ask for help, so you’re not being lazy. The writer really emphasised persistent independent effort to pursue knowledge and understanding. That was not what I was doing when I failed, but I felt entitled enough to throw my toys, because I equated time with effort. Keeping calm, continuously revisiting the pseudo code, finding a different approach and expressing your logic helps keep the productive flow pleasant and your attitude open enough to avoid seeing problems as problems, but as part of the learning experience.

The immediate connotation of failure is this sneering, mocking, provocative figure that feels like it’s out to make your life miserable because it's withholding your success. It’s in your way or worse kicking you down. We may see a representation of our worst fears, an embodiment of the worst parts of ourselves or a reflection of our inadequacies. We want to avoid it or break down in front of it. It is a threat to our confidence. If we were to look at failure as a teacher, we may instead see a constraint that provides us with a temporary blockage pr gives us a challenge that forces us to stop and rethink, try again or attempt something different. One writer articulated this powerful idea that constraint is a source of creativity, the limitation of which provides opportunity to innovate. By existing and requiring us to pause, this teacher expects us to learn something new by engaging with it and thereby find another way to get to greener pastures.

After seeing a useful template on dev to help formally track my progress, I can really see the outcome of my stumbling blocks. Through engaging with failure, its almost as if my learning experience gets enriched, because I learn more than what I even needed too for the task at hand. I always get a few extra nuggets of wisdom, my existing knowledge gets consolidated and my muscle of persistence is given a good workout.

John Maxwell wrote an entire book that broke down the approach to failure, by using the word learn in place of fail, taking a very proactive approach that completely changes one’s attitude in the moment and in anticipation of failure. Coming to terms with meeting failure as any other teacher, really is about adjusting my attitude and unlearning my intuitive egotistical reactions. Who knew programming would prove to be such a holistic and existential learning experience?

Links to the wonderful articles I referred to:
https://medium.com/@krisgage/stop-living-in-someday-ced2d71e2b89

https://dev.to/codeidoscope/tracking-your-progress-to-improve-your-confidence-12lh
https://dev.to/sunnysingh/should-you-be-perfect-14e7
https://dev.to/msarit/how-to-ask-for-help-without-seeming-lazy-2hmh
How to win and how to fail/learn – John Maxwell

3 LESSONS FROM A PYTHON BEGINNER

KerushaG — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 17:58:39 +0000

My programming journey started off when I still had a full-time job, and I got into an online copy of Head First Programming for Python. I went through it slowly, one small chunk at a time, and sometimes did not return to the content for days on end. I was genuinely interested in learning, so I got rid of the excuses and decided to take a leap. I quit my job early, made an investment and signed up for a software engineering bootcamp for three months. I am on Day 13 and there are a couple of key realizations I have made that will aid me better in my learning process and help me develop a more appropriate frame of mind, the deeper I get into the content.

Lesson1 = “Time to Understand vs. Time to Submit”

Before I started the bootcamp I took my time playing around with what I was attempting to learn, and I had fun. I do acknowledge that I possess a fear that leads me into bouts of procrastination and escapism when I’m faced with content that I perceive as difficult. Back then I had convenient excuses for my lack in consistency. Now that I have devoted my time and prioritised the bootcamp, I have no such excuses and I feel that resistance seeping in, especially now things are started to get interesting (substitute word for difficult).

On the other hand, despite investing 50 hours in each week (or attempting too), it dawned on me that my learning tactics were a bit problematic. As the tasks got more… interesting, I was not fully comprehending of some of the concepts. I had to slow down. I realised I was rushing to meet two goals – 1) creating a program that worked and that fit the course instructions and 2) thriving off the gratification that came with submitting. I was not using my time to my benefit and I was approaching the learning process with a very rote mentality.

Lesson2 = “Making it Work vs Understanding How To”

For the first 8 days, I was flying through the content meticulously making notes and highlighting in my specially hand-covered book. Understanding what I wrote, I would then dive into the tasks. I didn’t take the time to play around and write my own codes to test and figure out the concepts and its limitations, loopholes and benefits. Instead, I just wanted to get each task done. However, getting something done to fulfill a sense of validation becomes a whole lot more pressurising as opposed to working through something because you want to understand.

Understanding is more enjoyable than trying to get it right, that’s for sure. My body is more relaxed, my attitude is lighter, and my mind is more open to thinking clearly. Most importantly, the biggest drawback of just getting a program to work is that one fails to really interrogate and explore whether the program works under different circumstances with unexpected input from a user. For example, after I delightedly wrote a code and ran it, my enthusiasm evaporated when my mentor entered things I hadn't anticipated and it broke. In other words, pursuing how to write sustainable, efficient and simple code is more important than making it work - quality work over immediate satisfaction.

Lesson3 = “Pursuing Gratification vs Taking Initiative”

Another tactic that I was not pursuing was taking initiative. When I didn’t know or understand something I was impatient to receive the answers immediately. I don’t have immediate access to my course mentor and he does take a while to reply, but my personal mentor is very supportive and is open to my questions. However, I took that for granted. There are so many resources online, it is frankly embarrassing that I kept asking him instead of enriching my learning process by employing integrated mediums of knowledge in my understanding. I just wanted to get rid of the feelings of fear and not knowing, because it begins to churn into feelings of stupidity and doubt. Substituting this by setting higher standards in my work ethic, will pay off in the long run. It will just takes time and it means treating tasks as a major learning medium in and of itself, looking beyond the expectations of execution to consider and interrogate it's components.

Navin_Reddy_YouTube_Tutor = “It’s not difficult it’s just unfamiliar”

I found this line so uplifting, because I cannot control something like having a “natural propensity” for a certain skill or mindset, but I can invest time and I can practise. I realised I was learning in very one-dimensional capacities and that whatever questions or inquiring ideas I had, I ought to make the effort to use and build into my learning process.

So that’s all that I have learnt so far, much of it still needs to be implemented, as a lot of my learning habits need to be overridden and unlearnt to make space for new experiences. If you have any more tips or pearls of wisdom, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

Re- “Programming” my mind and facing the “Python” of my fears

KerushaG — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 07:12:22 +0000

So how did I, a 26 year old with a BA degree and a Honours in Historical Studies, having cited soft skills as her main asset in countless job applications, AND has a severely poor tolerance for technology, begin learning programming? Excellent question. Well that’s what happens when you date a software engineer.

I was unhappy and ill-prepared for a life in academia, so I quit my Masters and decided to job hunt. My partner had attempted to persuade me on the merits of maybe up-skilling (I'm not sure if this is a word, but I think it should exist) myself. He based it on the immediate employment and financial prospects, which I found titillating. However, after trying to understand what this programming thing entailed (ok I didn’t try all that much), I got overwhelmed and frustrated and just never looked at it again. The thing is I was more interested in the benefits, a quick fix to my dilemma, certainly not the learning process. However, whether it was calculated or not, my partner brought the matter up again a few months later in a much more strategic way.

I was a lot more open to learning, my intellectual capabilities were being wasted at the temporary retail gig I have and job prospects were not popping up. I had nothing to lose. Plus he found a really awesome book which was the perfect bait, seeing that I respond better to reading material. It simplified programming in a way that was not so intimidating. In two hours my partner let me grill him on everything that I needed to know to grasp the idea and concepts behind programming, as he set me up with the tools I would need to start working through the book. After that chat, I was amazed! The sheer intelligence and brilliance of this craft, made even easier by tools created to create! It was mind-blowing… I kept thinking about all that I knew and took for granted, in new ways. I was keen to start the book.

Chapter One was packed and took a while to work through, but I did begin to note certain behavioral tendencies within myself. I was quick to lose patience, because I wanted to get the answers and understand the content immediately. I wanted to get it right, but I also wanted to truly understand and make sense of what I was learning. The reactions I experienced were largely centered on emotions, mainly insecurities and fear. I realised I have had a love-hate relationship with technology. I am a person that is for development and change, but when it comes to technology, I harbour mistrust and a fear that this thing that is meant to make my life easy will simply pull a one-up-over-me, make me seem stupid and not do the thing I wanted to do and worst of all, just break. That has happened a few times, but looking back I guess it was also because I did not take the time to understand. I expected instant gratification and instead experienced a deep sense of discomfort that it was all to difficult and complicated for me to understand anyway.

While I began learning the basics of code writing, I also realised how logical it was. I was reminded of the feelings I had when I did maths in high school. The moments I relished when I got the rights answers and the deep negative wave of emotions that came over me when I struggled to grasp it or took a lengthy amount of time to get it right or simply got it wrong. I started wondering why I had removed myself from learning anything math related after high school. For the longest time I blamed my math teacher for my disliking of maths… But I never failed maths, so she or I could not have been that bad. Perhaps it really was just the struggle to struggle through something that wasn't easy; that required time, work and persistence. For the longest time, even after high school I think I may have gotten used to downgrading my capabilities and preferred the doable so that I could achieve a faster sense of gratification of knowing and getting it right - never really pushing out of my comfort zone of what I chose to learn. This was a shocking revelation, given that in my individual capacity, I didn’t do too badly out of the comfort zone.

I lied to myself about what I could and could not do. In the words of Eleanor Roosevelt (which ironically I came across by fluke prior to writing this), I need to do what I don't want to. I need to unlearn these lies that have turned into unhealthy beliefs about my logic and problem-solving skills, because I do want to evolve and I do not want to box myself into one frame of mind or set of capabilities. If anything, this journey of committing to learning programming is to empower myself by facing my fears, discomforts, insecurities and laziness by exercising my brain in new ways. I hope to triumph over all that negative emotions that reign down on me when I don’t understand something, or when something doesn’t work and it feels as though this heavy weight is bearing down my shoulders and my self worth is tied into this one little thing because I start wondering if I am stupid. No. I will learn to persevere, swallow down those emotions, flex through and hopefully I don’t lose all my hair by the end of it all.

So I decided that this journey cannot be about creating new apps and selling them to make profits, to become a top notch developer and score an amazing job or to switch careers. No this is about facing my internal barriers and smashing them. It is about doing what I for so long believed I could never and would never do. I am excited and scared.