MakerSquare Day 55: "I have the skills." (12/2)

That's my takeaway quote from tonight's alumni panel discussing, well, what it's like to be an alumni of MakerSquare. "I have the skills" was the realization that the alumnus in question had when working out a problem at their job. Maybe they didn't have the knowledge, per se; but from their time at MakerSquare they had the skills to find the answer.

Though today's panel was only a few hours of the day, with that sort of positive message, it certainly left something of a influence. Or maybe that's just how it is when people share their horrible interview stories.

(Although, is it wrong that every time I hear an interview story involving a coding challenge--like "reverse a string in JavaScript"--my brain always stops for a moment while I work out how I would do that? I guess the lesson here is, if you need to distract me, give me a fun coding challenge.)

(Also, it's a lot easier to laugh at horrible interview stories when the people are not employed and happily so.)

But really, today was spent doing a rather large amount of tasks. Is there anything better than crossing tasks off your task list? I don't think so, which is probably why one of my final projects is all about creating tasks and then marking them as done.

I also realize that I've been talking very vaguely about my final projects and about things I've learned. Well, OK, I did write about how to make a Chrome extension, both in general and in particular.

But what about Rails, which is what my ShareCare app uses? What about Foundation and HTML and CSS and JavaScript? (OK, not I'm just listing my tech stack.)

I'm coming to the end of my allotted 15 minute writing time, so I won't be able to get into all of that today. But I will say this: one thing that I've learned through my weeks here is that documentation--even the littlest bit--can make a huge difference. When I go to find a Gem to do something and there are several out there (there's a lot of overlap among Gems), I tend to choose the one with the best documentation.

Which is why I spent so much time this week working on my Github README files and that's today's lesson: good documentation includes a clear README.