Weekly Journal : Essays

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out. — Robert Collier

Submitting Your Work

Push a Markdown formatted plain text file, named week02_failure.md, to the journal folder in your individual portfolio_NETID repository provided for you in the course's Gitlab group.

Specification

Habits Essay

According to research from Duke University, around 40 percent of the actions people perform every day are not due to decision-making but habits.

Take a moment to reflect on what that means. Almost half of the things you do on a given day are not the result of conscious decisions but behaviors that you have repeated so many times they have become more or less automatic. You no longer think about them, you just do them. While no formal study has been done, the number is likely higher when writing code.

Habits are useful because they are cognitively efficient, the automation of common actions frees mental resources for other tasks. Thus, when habits are formed, they were likely useful to you for some reason (helpful in some way but, unfortunately, not necessarily a good reason or good for your long-term development). And, as anyone who has tried to study more effectively, get in shape, or change some aspect of their personality can attest, changing your habits can be very hard.

In this course, you will be learning many new habits to replace bad coding habits (developed due to lack of knowledge, lack of motivation, or whatever reason that was useful at the time). For example, making readable code is a matter of practicing to develop new habits like using longer meaningful names (which is supported by your IDE) or naming magic values or creating more methods (which can be done for you by your IDE).

Consider the following quotes about habits:

• Quality is not an act, it is a habit.
  
• Your habits are how you embody your identity.
• Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do).
• Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not.
• Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. This is why habits are crucial.
• As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.

Choose two as starting points to reflect on how you typically write code or manage your projects and what about those habits you want to work on changing in this course.

Learning from Failure Essay

Mistakes are inevitable, especially when attempting something you have never done before. However, especially in a school setting, they should not be painful experiences but, instead, opportunities for learning and improving. In fact, many experts suggest keeping a personal Failure Journal to help you see patterns in your mistakes. With every experience comes the choice to retreat or grow and change. Indeed, in this course, you will be judged less for your mistakes than how you respond to and improve from them.

Consider the following quotes about failure:

• Failure is important
• If you can't accept failure, you'll never learn from it.
• Failure is an event, not a person
• Fail often in order to succeed sooner
• Failing is easy; trying again takes courage
• We learn from failure, not from success

Choose two as starting points to reflect on unsuccessful academic experiences and how you ultimately benefited from them (whether or not it seemed painful at the time).