Destination Dev V
In the last couple of weeks at Makers, I learned that what goes on in GitHub stays in GitHub. Even when you delete and change stuff. This means not only the early stuff when you don’t really understand what you are doing, but the READMEs, comments, and commit messages. It’s fine that the early stuff is chaotic, since it shows how far you’ve come, but…
… the commit messages where I might have been trying to express my personality may be perceived as a touch wide of the mark. From now on, I will ensure that my content is fairly formal, and this will demonstrate that I listen, and will take on board advice that I am given. If I write cheeky programs though, the accompanying words will of course be appropriately cheeky. My forewarning to all prospective programmers and Makers students, then, is
“GitHub has an elephantine memory and will grass you up. Only tell it light hearted gossip.”
Another thing that I learned in the last couple of weeks is that I like SQL. I dare you to open that link and go down the Wikipedia worm hole. No further comment.
The tempo here has increased in the recent weeks, which is why I haven’t posted a blog for a bit. This whole experience is hog wild and I’m in a sensitised emotional state, both upwards and downwards. I’m completely in agreement with the “Better to do 50% and understand 100% than do 100% but only understand 50%” philosophy, but then I was still breaking out in a sweat about impending group projects. What if I can’t contribute? What about the group dynamic? Some students are surely in the 100% of the 100% camp and will they tolerate me?
Lord of the Flies Week is now done, and we can all go away and think about what we have learned (“Now go to the corner and think about what you have done!”) and improve from there. This has been the most anxious I have felt all course, which is surprising to me, since teamwork is one of my most core working values. I realise that it’s probably because in the real life workplace, there are designated roles: leaders, juniors, knowledge powerhouses and so on. As Makers students, no one in the team is paid more than the other, no one is the boss who is leading us and dishing out tasks, and we are all learning. Of course, there are more advanced programmers who help out the less advanced, but we have to work out how to work together in a constricted space of time with no right or wrong way, dodging descent into William Golding territory. You see, these group projects are not coach-led or moderated. We’re freestyling it, yet the law of entropy reverses and structure just sort of germinates, and even more curious is that our Friday afternoon retro with the cohort felt just as it does with coaches present, yet they were not.
My battery is now flat, so it’s nighty night folks.
