Accidentally in Code

Tag: questions

  • Powerful Questions

    Powerful Questions

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    Credit: Pexels / Tookapic

    There’s a question in my coaching prep that I can never seem to answer.

    Debrief of last week’s inquiry. (a designated powerful question for the week – the power is in the asking of the question – getting curious and inquiring into its meaning for you.)

    Before each coaching session, I go through and answer the questions and reflect on what has happened in the time between. It’s so useful, and then I get to this question – the second to last – and I’m just like… what.

    2017 was an intense year for me personally and professionally, and of course set against the backdrop of the world ending. I moved to a new country, and like properly-no-longer-nomad moved – after three years of roaming the world. I ended a project that had been a big part of those three years. I committed to posting a photo a day. I travelled a lot and worked a lot more. I learned how to manage managers, worked on getting better at product and strategy, dealt with and helped others through challenges. I was a good friend to some people and a less than great one to others. I embraced some people in my life and let others fade out of it.

    I explored the extent of my capacity – taking a ~20 hour a week course on top of my rather more than 40 hour a week job in the middle of the year. But I never quite managed to recharge from that – I went straight from that into a bout of tonsillitis (whilst on vacation in the Galapagos, oh my god) that I recovered maybe 80% from but not completely – until a second round of antibiotics that I took over the new year. I felt like I was drowning in shoulds, lacking the strength or resilience to every really make progress out of the pool.

    What does this have to do with powerful questions? When it was clear to me that I was building on a shaky foundation, I embraced the idea – and need – to consolidate first. To go back to and nail the basics – where I live, how I feel, what I do. To take the things that were line items in last year’s list of forty goals and break them out into all the pieces that are required to actually cross them off this time.

    And I started looking at things and saying, “is this nailing the basics?” — the flattering invitation, the CfP that I could submit to, the new talk I could prepare. Decisions became easier, and finally…

    …finally, I understood the power of the inquiry.

     

  • Questions for an End of Year 1:1

    Questions for an End of Year 1:1

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    Credit: Pexels

    My coach (Dani) went through this list of questions in our call last week, and I’ve been using it in my last 1:1s of 2017. I’ve been finding it interesting as a structure for a conversation that looks back at the year and where we are now, versus where we were a year ago. Sometimes it’s not the answer itself, but the conversation it kicks off…

    1.) Who did you meet this year who is now in your life? What about meeting them was significant?

    2.) What experience/situation caused you to grow?

    3.) What experience did you lean into despite fear?

    4.) What accomplishments are you most proud of?

    5.) In what area of your life did you make some progress?

    6.) What was missing from your life this year?

    7.) Who have you helped succeed? / Who has helped you succeed?

    8.) What are you most grateful for, and why?

    9.) What were the most fun times you had?

    10.) What advice would you give yourself for 2018?

  • Parameterized Testing in JUnit 4, or Twitter is Awesome Because…

    Parameterized Testing in JUnit 4, or Twitter is Awesome Because…

    You can ask a specialized, fairly technical question to the world in general…

    And get a response from someone who really knows what they’re talking about! (I have books by this guy!)

    Made my day!

    If you’re interested in JUnit 4 and testing, a brief explanation.

    JUnit 4 allows you to create parameterized tests. I.e. you have a test case that you run multiple times on slightly different data. Instead of writing individual test cases, you write one and pass it different arguments. It’s pretty easy.

    But, if you’re running tests like this every single test is run on each set of parameters. I thought there would be an annotation, like @NotParam where I  could basically tell the test runner, “Run this test once, it doesn’t take any parameters”. But there’s not – good to know!

  • Do We Need Time Management Advice?

    Time
    Credit: flickr / John-Morgan

    We’re having an event at WISE next week, we were hoping to have someone from SASS to come and give some advice on time management. But SASS is never open, and now we have something much better.

    But when I was panicking for a speaker, thinking about maybe asking another student to speak I started to wonder if there’s any point giving time management advice.

    For me, time management consists of carving out the  quiet time and space that I need to create. One of my office mates and I were talking yesterday, and he’s the same way. Our supervisor, though, was saying that he needed a little pressure.

    I have a friend who plans every minute of every day in this insane spreadsheet that has her working from 6am to 11pm (she actually sticks to it too), and another who discovered the need to be more organized last semester, and for him it consists of notebooks that he writes everything down in.

    For me, I take a more technological solution. Everything is digital, and my calendar and todo list are always accessible via my iPhone or whichever computer I happen to be working on. My boyfriend is different again, he doesn’t seem to have a todo list or much in the way of a calendar, but he somehow stays on top of everything. Honestly, most of what I’m doing is in my head as well. However if I don’t write it down it makes me anxious. My boyfriend doesn’t seem to have that problem, though.

    So I’ve started to think that we don’t need time management advice so much as a series of questions to reflect on.

    • Do we need clear spaces? If so, how can we better carve them out?
    • Do we need stuff scheduled every day in order to pressurize us?
    • Maybe we need a balance of both? For me, I like 2-3 days clear, the rest scheduled.
    • What’s the best fit for us in terms of how we store our schedule? Do we need a notebook or diary, or is an electronic device better (note, you need to remember to charge it).
    • How are we at balancing our time? Do we need to schedule “me time” or “organization time” or does taking breaks for these tasks come naturally?
    • Do we need a more regimented approach, such as “work on X for 2 hours and then work on Y for 1.5”?
    • Or does a more relaxed approach of, “work on X on Wednesday” work better?

    What do you think? What questions do you ask yourself in order to manage your time better?

  • Questions from my Art, Life and Programming Lecture

    Should I switch to mac? Is it hard to get used to?

    Yes, switching to Mac was the best thing I ever did and does wonders for my productivity. I have found it much easier to develop on Macs than on Windows.

    Are there places children shouldn’t go on the internet?

    I think this question is answered really well in Don Tapscott‘s Grown Up Digital. The short answer is – yes, but adding blocks is not the way to stop them. They’ll find a way around it! There are risks to restricting their access too much, too.

    What do I think about the idea of the Semantic web.

    I’m sure we will see the improvements the semantic web is supposed to offer, but I make no prediction as to whether they will come as a result of the semantic web, or something else (like improved NLP).

    What are your predictions for new technologies?

    The only prediction I will make here is that we will be surprised.

    What programming languages do you think will be big in the future, and how do I prepare?

    I think functional programming will become more important, due to it’s inherently thread-safe nature. Google uses concepts from functional programming, and I think others will catch on. C# incorporates some elements of functional programming, and I think that will be big too. Java will continue to be used, just because so many students are graduating knowing it. Keep an eye on Google’s new programming language, too.

    Prepare yourself for change – learn an OO language, a scripting language, and a functional one. This will make it easier for you to learn the new languages that will come along.

    (If you’re interested in learning Java, I will be running more workshops in the new year – contact me or note in the comments if you want to hear about them as they arise. I may also run something on the basics of Haskell, if there’s demand. If you’re interested in learning Ruby, check out Ruby Tuesdays at the Code Factory).

    Why is it so hard to access BASIC on Windows 98?

    Because few people use it and Microsoft has opted to make it difficult for your average users to get to the few development tools that are available as standard.

    I think this is one of the reasons why I see more and more developers using Macs, because it comes with many programming language compilers (Java, Python, C etc) as standard and to get to them, the developer just need to fire up a terminal.

    Quantum computing.

    I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about this! Try Wikipedia.

    What’s Java?

    Java is a programming language, taught widely and used in many applications due to it’s system independence (i.e the same code should work on a Mac, a Windows machine, or on Unix).

    It is also possible to use Java code in web applications. For example, Processing is built on Java and makes it easy to create applets which are embeddable in your web-browser (see mine).