Susanna Codes

Software Engineering Goals: Independently Completing Routine Tasks and Simple Features I am on to the 5th out of 8 of my goals. I am 3/4 of the way through with processing these. I'll still have to revisit things afterwards but this has been a huge piece of work which will make all the difference to me I believe. These have gotten harder and harder to write up. I'm not gonna lie; I've gotten pretty tired. Not sure if it's been 2 or 3 weeks that I've been doing these on the side.  When I finish, my side projects will be: My Python course, and then Django course, and then other courses and so on... Anything more to do with this Anything else that comes up like git study or whatever They are getting harder to write up because I'm tired but they are easier and smaller to process and to write up as we go on. So without further ado, here is my 6th out of eight goals: independently completing routine tasks and simple features. Here is the goal then: In my last job I d...

Midnight thoughts about git (really) Some things can only happen at midnight. Thinking about git like I am right now is one of them.  Git has been on my mind recently a lot. As my software engineering work ramps up - YES you read that correctly! As we have finally found a way to make tickets accessible to me my work has SKYROCKETED and nobody is happier than me.  The last two work days have been the most fulfilling of my career. Yes you read that correctly.  I am finally doing proper software engineering again.  With the correct rules, and focus. And the accessible tickets that I can work with now (tickets haven’t changed much but how I approach them has and the new iterative approach that I have for them is amazing - it’s quite complicated and it’s a long process involving personal docs but if anyone ever has a neurodivergent employee who is as lost as I was we can help out). With the correct priorities and goals. And with reminding myself again and again to come ba...

Things I Need To Focus On - Part 2  I am listening to the song "Monsters Theme" by Jon Hopkins and it is like an variation on his other song - my FAVOURITE coding song ever - "Candles." So grateful to have rediscovered it yesterday. It feels just like the biggest hug from life in the world and I want to cry.  I'm sorry.  I can't say anything else. I can't say anything more than that. I just feel so inspired. I love what I do SO much. Thank you. Using chat gpt to help understand instructions Sometimes I can't understand what people are saying to me in writing. Whether that be instructions on a ticket or comments on a PR I just can't understand what people are saying to me. In that cases it can be helpful to use chat GPT. I just literally can say to it "what does this sentence mean." This saves me from having to write lots and lots of follow up messages. It allows me to crack on and get the job done faster. Because not only does it bother...

I hope you will read my blog and know a story of overcoming adversity That’s it. That’s the post. I hope you will read my blog and know the story of someone who is doing the best she can. I hope you will read the story of someone who’s giving it all she’s got every day. I hope you will know the story of someone who everyday is overcoming all sorts of challenges and doesn’t give up. I hope you will read my blog and know the story of someone who loves so so much it hurts. I hope you will read my blog and know my story the story of loving something so so much that every day I have to work on processing this amazing love. What an amazing problem to have. It’s the best problem in the world to have 🧡❤️‍🔥🧡💛🥰😍 I hope my story shows that what ever you are dealing with. You can have your love and your passion and you can overcome everything. My passion shines like a radiant light amidst of all of my being and amidst of all of my difficulties. I wish I could say more. I have overcome a lot ...

Things I Need To Focus On - Part 1 Probably my favourite software engineering song at the moment is “So Long, London” by Taylor Swift. How is that possible? Because the raw passion in the song makes it impossible to hide my dreams and goals from myself. Try to hide anything from yourself while listening to that song! It will make you feel all of your deepest feelings. I love software engineering so so much. I love software engineering omg.  And the more you listen to it and the more versions the more you will be able to feel your desires. So here the things that I need to focus on. Because I love software engineering more than anything else in the world and I will never ever give up on it. Thank you. So here are all the areas where I need to improve - not for coding courses, but for REAL software engineering. Thank you. x As An Aside: (doing this in two parts so I can get it published as it is taking me so long)  I am working on this from my 6th floor Brighton office and start...

Software Engineering Goals: Improving Debugging So we are on to the second half of my software engineering goals. This half should be easier to write up. This half is more technical. The contents are easier to get and they are shorter and there is less and fewer examples. But they are still really important goals nonetheless. And there is more to them than may seem to catch the eye at first, as I have learned by going over them over the last week or so! So the first goal is really around being better at debugging in the codebase and in the database. Debugging  This is a very specific goal. It is something that a seasoned more experience software engineer would know inside out. Sadly, it just hasn't come up for me very much and this is why I need to learn how to do it so much more in the context of work and where I'm working at now; my IDE, my app, my new language and framework and so on.  Basically I just want to get better at going inside of codebases and databases and just d...

I can fly with you, Part 2 Sometimes it can be a little bit hard to keep on going and to keep on being as motivated as I am right now. With all the motivation in the world, my days are long, and, in the words my close colleague, I face a lot of “barriers” that other people don’t face. But I also have a lot of passion that a lot of other people don’t have. So it all balances out I suppose. Because really what all always always keeps me going every day is love. What keeps me going is love. If you are not motivated by love, then what are you even motivated by? Love for pylons.  Love for wind farms. Love for hydroelectric dams. Love for software engineering. Love for growth. Love for my wonderful and beautiful colleagues. Love for people who will stay on a call after hours debugging with me. Love for people who will go out of their way to give me honest feedback. Love for my friends. Love for honest feedback and the power of this and the growth that this can lead to and bring. Love for...

Bamboo How coding is more creative than people think  Around about the time that I realised that I was meant to be a software engineer and committed to it for life, I became obsessed with the song Bamboo by Elder Island. In fact that makes me realise how long ago it was. It was pretty much the same night. I am not afraid of this story anymore; I had a seizure in the centre of Brighton and everyone misunderstood the situation and I was having a rough time. There was a woman on scene who was helping but she couldn’t quite get what I needed although she was wonderful (I’ll come back to her). But then a mysterious man came along with his wife. And they got talking to me. And they got talking to me about coding. And just like today. That can get me to recover pretty fast. And so they took me inside of a fancy cafe. And people who don’t have seizures cannot understand this. You can often get treated like scum by businesses around you or by people who have seen it happen. As they don’t kn...

Software Engineering Goals: Attempt 2; Delivering Tasks and Designing Effective Solutions To Product Features or Small-Scope Engineering Challenges Due to my passion and my strength and my inspiration - I have decided to give this one a second go. I am really really determined to do this one properly. And to do this whole thing properly. So here is goal number 3 again, with my revised/updated thoughts. So here it is one more time please, in full, in all its glory, and all of its fullness "Delivers tasks and designs effective solutions to product features or small-scope engineering challenges." Okay so yes let me try this out one more time then please thank you. I am sorry if it repeats itself from the last time round. It's just that I want to make sure that I have understood this one properly please. Thank you. So in order to explain this goal to you I want to take you back to the very beginning... of a feature request. Imagine that the feature request had just come in. L...

Software Engineering Goals: Owning Smaller Problem Spaces and Repeatedly Achieving Successful Outcomes For These Problems I find learning really hard - so I have decided to make my learning journey public. This was never really a conscious decision for me but I have been doing this for a long time. Due to my neurodiversity, it is inherently harder for me to learn, and to process things, and especially to follow written instructions or absorb written information. I would give anything to succeed and I would give anything to do what I love. I would rather share my goals with the whole wide world and have this blog as a learning tool and a platform and use this avenue and source of support than care about whether I look good, or have to care about what anybody thinks of me. Because I would give everything for my career. I would give everything for my dreams, and for my missions, and my goal. I hope that this shows. I hope that you can see that too. How Amazing My Manager Is This is my fou...

Every Single Thing I Touch Becomes Sick With Sadness Firstly the title is a quote from a Taylor Swift song. Please do not worry. But it’s just the mood that I needed to capture in one of my blog posts. I guess I am quite worried about something tomorrow. I keep on getting stuck on this same thing. On the same aspects of ticketing omg. Basically what my next steps are: I need to take the current ticket I am on and write up what I think the next steps are. I need to try and figure out - okay let me start again then: I need to take a look at my current ticket. I am about halfway through.  Step 1: I need to try and understand the instructions of what the rest of the ticket is telling me to do.  I can use AI to help me to understand any sentences I don’t understand (story of my life…) and I can use my notebook and pen and lots of writing things out by hand to try and make sense of what the actual ask is for this task. If anything is still not clear then I can ask my colleague. Step...

I would like to align my life more with my love for the pylons I sometimes don’t feel as strong as I do at other times but then I see a pylon and I remember my own strength again. Whenever I search for healing I just always seem to find or end up in another field of pylons or something. Whenever I search for meaning or try to find the answers to some questions I always just seem to end up with more pylons. I don’t know how to love something so much. I don’t know how to love something as much as I love wind farms and I love pylons. How could I love anything this much. What can I do with it? Write about it? Swear to work in renewable energy forever and ever? At least for as long as I am able to? That’s what I did and then I lost my last job. I thought the renewable energy dream was gonna go or go on pause. I am still breathing in the miracle that it worked out with me for finding another renewable energy job. I am still breathing in the miracle that it worked out for me not only with ren...

I dream of home Reflecting on some of my little fears I can’t help it. When I look at a wind farm. I see so much love. When I look at a wind farm.  I see so, so, so much love. My love for the wind farms, the pylons, and the internet towers, is greater than any pain I have been through. In the love, my pain can dissolve. In the love for the wind farms, the pylons and the internet towers. My pain of any past experiences of mine cowers and dissolves away and disappears forever, eternally. There’s a lot on my mind at the moment  There’s a lot that’s on my mind. I am still struggling a bit with my software engineering goals.  I actually think I want to go back and redo number 3 again. Just because I still don’t feel like I really get it. This includes making another set of two infographics. I also need to go back to my previous blogpost on it and add in a tiny bit about testing at the end. And I just am struggling with number 4 in general. I am struggling with it the most of a...

For Every Ending, A New Beginning I just read a sentence in “The Pragmatic Programmer” that was so beautiful I almost cried. “Every day, work to refine the skills you have and to add new tools to your repertoire.” I so very nearly cried. Isn’t this what I do? I hope that this is what I do.  In every blog post, and in every LinkedIn post, I am only ever just trying to grow. I have zero interest in being an influencer. I never went into this for anything else. But every blog post is this: nurturing my passion, or trying to learn some new coding skills. Or focusing on my software engineering goals. But sometimes the best thing to do is to just write. You never know what might come out. What reflections. Like I was just thinking about all the things I’ve turned down. Opportunities. I was invited to join a free evening course for women software engineers. I declined. Why? Because I have the best goals in the world from my workplace. My manager has given me the best goals in the world. A...

Interlude: Reflecting on the Differences between Software Engineering Goals no.’s 3 & 4  I am a bit stuck on writing up my fourth software engineering goal. It intersects quite closely with the third one. They are both still a part of the same thing. They both represent two parts of the same process. Goal three is about designing and architecting a solution when the feature request or problem is delivered to me. Goal four is actually acting on this and implementing it. It’s about how much help I get. It’s about getting no help at all on smaller problems. It’s about getting some help on medium to large problems. It’s also about how much time I take. It’s about speeding up and doing things faster and getting better at solving problems with time.  Especially over time. I want to be able to prove that I have become faster at solving a problem with time than I was beforehand. And it’s about having done it time and time over again. It’s about having a proven track record of just...

Baby, For Everything A Reason I know better than to write a midnight blog post. So here I am writing a midnight blog post. I’ll keep it short. I have often often thought about what I can do for the world and what I can bring to the world through coding and software engineering (no spoiler alert understatement I think about it all the time). But what I didn’t think about is what coding does for me. Oh my God. What coding does for me. I’m autistic. I didn’t know that I was autistic until I began to code. I had ADHD and to be honest when I was forced to work in an office and stop isolating myself it became obvious to me. But it took a few years to really see it for sure. Coding made it abundantly clear. Now it’s the most obvious thing in the world. But no it’s not just that. As I said in my interview with codecademy last year, coding is quite literally the only thing that calms me down. And it’s not even far off from being true. Of course I love sensory regulation things. Who doesn’t love...

Software Engineering Goals: Delivering tasks and designing effective solutions Here, so the next one of my goals is the third one on the list; there are eight goals in total, there are two sections of four goals each. There is definitely a pattern emerging across the two, the more and more that I do this; I mean of course there was always a pattern there.  But I am just spotting one more and more myself the deeper and deeper that I go into it.  One of these patterns is translating human problems into code. I love it. I love it. I just love it. I just love it. I just love it. I just love it. That's what it's all about isn't it? That's what we're here to do isn't it? Software engineering? Translate human problems into code. Translating products into code. Because you see products are really just all about solving problems.  I know as much. I worked in product once. I did pretty well at it. I just couldn't stay in it for long. I loved coding too much, you see. ...

The Best is the Enemy of the Good: Getters, Setters, and pathlib After a week of not working late, I found myself late in the office processing some of my software engineering goals. Hey, it's okay to get things wrong sometimes. It's okay to make mistakes. It's okay to set rules for yourself and to only stick to them 90% of the time. Or 70% of the time. I love coding. I don't know how I ever got through without it. People search their whole lives for something like this. I only waited 28 years... Getters, Setters and Deleters Using getter, setter and deleter methods are one way to implement encapsulation within Python.  This allows classes to handle the state of their own attributes. Some methods are only intended to be used inside of their own class. But why? I asked chat gpt and apparently this is to keep things simpler, to avoid errors, and to keep things safer - to avoid problems - whatever on earth that means. It allows you to control some kind of typing, I guess. ...