Muted Swan, Part II

Woke up early, can’t sleep, wanted to get some thoughts down (not that early anyway anymore). As usual I have some stuff I need to improve on. 

I have had some feedback on; improving the quality of my testing, improving the quality of my debugging, and improving the quality of my PRs, as well as some other pointers as well especially related to debugging.

It’s not that early anymore after all so I only have a few minutes. But let my reflect for a few minutes on errors I have made and how I can fix them. No pun intended about the errors btw sorry.

So as you can see from the above infographic. I was making lots of mistakes on my PRs: leaving code in, leaving types, leaving comments. This was because I wasn’t rereading them. 

I did in my last job but here I wasn’t asked to so I kind of got away with it. However I’ve gotten better at it recently. Once I was told explicitly I started doing it (like with most things in life). One thing I need to keep on remembering to do is rereading any subsequent iterations to any PR I push. As there are inevitably and invariably revisions every time. And that’s okay. That’s normal.

Similarly I have stuff to improve on with testing. Like being able to ask myself “What is this thing doing? Why is it doing this thing? And: what should I test to make sure the what and the why of the problem makes sense?”

I should know the edge cases of the features I’ve written myself, I should be comfortable writing tests for different things around it (yeah that’s fine), and I should know why we’re testing what we’re testing.

On improving debugging… I need to get better at running through the code line by line as if I was Python itself and seeing what it does. I’m actually pretty good at this kind of stuff. I am really good at reading code and I really understand stuff. Even across multiple languages. 

But maybe sometimes I get a bit overwhelmed or I’m trying to rush things. So I need to make sure I’m better at doing this.

Also with debugging my boss explained to me his process with errors. So I need to try it out a bit more. Thanks. I have my ways of doing this but they might not be the best. So I need to keep trying please. Thanks.

Last thing: I just have three things to improve on for myself please thanks. 

I want to send better messages at work. Sometimes I panic and write messages but then later I can look back and see that I know my own answers. 

I might panic into chat GPT instead. Because usually I know my own answers please. Thanks.

Everything I do, I do it for the offshore wind farms

Everything I do, I do it for the offshore wind farms.

And when I get sad I stop being sad and I look at the offshore wind farms instead. And every day I look out at the offshore wind farms in Brighton and I think: “I can fly with you, build AI with you.”

Python Agreements

So we have agreed that as well as finishing the intermediate Python course on codecademy I will do two modules from the advanced one. The other stuff we don’t think is relevant. So I will do intermediate Python and logging and database operations. 

We actually decided to leave the Django course for now because my Django is so good…

That was a nice thing to hear this week, please - thanks.