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In so many endeavors the hardest part is beginning. Starting a new job. Starting an exercise program. Quitting smoking. Leaving your comfort zone to do somethin

• fossuser 10y ago
  As an extension of this I've also found asking questions helps with the growth mindset. Often people are afraid to ask questions because they don't want to look stupid or admit ignorance, but explicitly admitting ignorance and asking what things mean or how things work in conversation actually has the opposite effect. You learn a lot faster and more often than not people feel more comfortable because you're being honest with what you don't understand. The side effect is that you usually end up looking 'smarter' anyway - somewhat ironically not asking questions because of fear of looking stupid can lead to it becoming clear you don't actually understand something you're pretending to which then does make you look stupid. I've seen two negative things that can come out of this - the first is the person that feigns surprise and says 'You don't know what X is?!". More common in college and around other people who are insecure about their own intelligence, best response to this is to admit ignorance again and re ask the question (usually becomes apparent that the person doing this doesn't know what they're talking about anyway and can't explain it well). I think this negative attitude is especially bad because it can disproportionately affect women in early CS because they are probably already worried about fitting in there anyway. Second negative thing is that asking questions when you do know the answer to show how smart you are is not the same thing as admitting ignorance and asking questions to learn - it comes across as obvious and is annoying. Long answer, but generally agree that growth mindset and treating negative experiences as 'learning experiences' is the way to go.
• contingencies 10y ago
  starting a new software project can be intimidating: the open green field of endless possibilities can be paralyzing. ... The trick is to just start. This is bad advice unless you are a complete novice. Industry experience seems to weigh in on the side of focused analysis: you need to better understand the problem space and break a potential implementation down to a relatively simplistic first stage goal. Relevant quotes: Any attempt to formulate all possible requirements at the start of a project will fail and would cause considerable delays. - Pahl and Beitz, 'Engineering Design' (2007) Sometimes the problem is to discover what the problem is. - Gordon Glegg, 'The Design of Design' (1969) In practice, designing seems to proceed by oscillating between sub-solution and sub-problem areas, as well as by decomposing the problem and combining sub-solutions. - Nigel Cross Success really depends on the conception of the problem, the design of the system, not in the details of how it's coded. - Leslie Lamport You're not going to come up with a simple design through any kind of coding techniques or any kind of programming language concepts. Simplicity has to be achieved above the code level before you get to the point which you worry about how you actually implement this thing in code. - Leslie Lamport ... more @ https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup (which has a whole section of quotes 'writing with applicability to software')