Day 3 Booleans & Conditionals

For some reason today felt easier than the first two days. I think I’ve reached the point where the newness of the program, the people, and the process has started to wear off. But since I come to this program with a decent amount of programming experience, a whole day on conditional statements seems like overkill.

Still, I am grateful for the thorough review because it is my tendency in self-study to try and jump ahead to the next step. In doing so, it’s easy to miss out on the foundations that are crucial for avoiding hitting my head against a wall later on. Smoothing out the foundations of my skills is one of the key reasons that I applied to this program in the first place.

Pathway:

After lunch, we did another pathway program focusing on the Strengths Finder personality assessment. The exercise was relatively short but allowed us to work in a group and see first hand how different strengths can function together. I’m skeptical of personality tests because they assume there exists an innate personality that isn’t constantly being shaped and changed and as a result, reduce an entire person to a handful of characteristics. On the other hand, I understand that people don’t really change that much after childhood and that there is value in understanding what you’re good at even if it changes down the road. My strengths are strategic, learner, acheiver, futuristic, and intellection. Almost all of these fall into the “strategic” category so perhaps my rejection of personality tests comes partly from wishing I was better with building relationships and influencing people. In Vinny’s presentation he said that what you want to do and what you are strong at are two different things. Chewing on that, it makes sense I feel some tension. Vinny also said that people are more engaged in their work when they are exercising their strengths, i.e. not trying to be something they are not. There are definitely good take-aways from this exercise.

Meetup:

Speaking of relationship building, I’ve been spending a lot of time browsing meetup.com and I’ve already RSVP’d to a Columbus Ruby Brigade meetup on the 20th, a Columbus Tech EI meetup on the 30th, and a Columbus Machine Learning meetup on the 5th of next month. I have been worried about feigning interest in meetups with the only goal being networking, but so far it’s been easy to find meetups which sincerely peak my interest. The machine learning meeting is on sentiment analysis of text and I’m especially excited about that. I remember reading that AI can already deduce mental illness from instagram photos or texts. To write programs like that would be incredible. Columbus Tech EI is a group which also deals with emotion and tech. This month’s meetup is on Embracing I Don’t Know and Asking for Help. It’s really cool to see groups in Columbus working with ideas that engage my interests so deeply.