Practice Practice Practice

Hello again! For this week’s blog I have chosen to write about the chapter from our textbook entitled “Practice, Practice, Practice”! The reason I chose this is because I saw it in the table of contents and it looked like something relateable and interesting to read. So without further ado, let’s jump on in to the chapter “Practice, Practice, Practice”.  The problem set up by this chapter is that you are always switched “ON” which never gives you a chance to learn from your daily programming mistakes. The book says its almost as if you’re always on stage. I feel that this can happen easily especially in a fast paced work environment like software development. Things in this field are always growing and changing and twisting and turning. Monday you might get assigned a project with requirements ABC and by Wednesday those requirements have changed form ABC to XYZ and the project now no longer holds any resemblence to the original project. In this case it is quite easy to get lost because you don’t have time to learn from your daily mistakes if you’re always trying to play catch up. The solution set forth by the book is interesting, however quite elementary and almost common sense. The main objective of the solution is to practice coding in an environment with zero pressure and in a place that you are comfortable and it is okay to break things. In other words, make a personal project at home or someplace other than work where the end objective does not matter, there is no customer or end user on the other side, and you can be free to break things and learn why they broke, then fix them at your own pace, allowing you to learn more so than if you were to be pressured and rushed to fix breakages in the field. There are many different ways to practice without interruption at your own pace where the actual environment does not matter. I think that it is one of the strongest ways to learn. Not only because you are teaching yourself (because you know how you learn best!) but because the environment in which you’re learning is truly stress free and problem free. Did it break while you were working? Who cares! It isn’t effecting anyone other than you. So take your time, work through the breakage, and fix it at your own pace and learn why it broke and how it was fixed!