“When did Python click for you in the last 3 years of Uni?”
Over the past 5 weeks as a demonstrator for a first-year intro to programming module, I’ve gotten a few questions that I thought might be good to delve into and create a discussion about.
When I got this question, I wanted to do 2 things, reply truthfully while also giving the student hope. I said something along the lines of:
“I’m going, to be honest, I’ve gotten multiple of those click moments throughout my time with Python and programming in general. However, I think the biggest click moment was sometime at the end of first year or the start of second when I realised…”Wow, I am a programmer”. This realisation, unlike the other clicks, was that I’d developed something I like to call 'developer resilience'. That is whenever I come across a problem I don’t instantly get, I keep at it. No matter how much time it takes and how much I feel frustrated.
What separates my stage 1 self and my stage 3 self is the amount of resilience I have. My advice to you would be to just keep going, no matter how much your brain tells you it wants to stop and be lazy.
It does get better though. I’m now confident that with any new programming language or library I see, I can probably crack it as well as any other programmer in a week or less.”
I think this concept is very important in approaching new problems in life in a more general sense but especially in a field like computing where you almost always will have to adapt to incoming technologies.
How would you have answered a similar question?