kellishaver

There are a whole host of valuable skills that learning to program teaches you; critical thinking and analytical skills, problem solving and planning, organizational skills, collaborative skills, reading comprehension and writing skills (documentation).

These are all extremely important skills to have and they all seem to be severely lacking from her public school education, where the emphasis is on teaching to the test and following a less than ideal Common Core curriculum. Going to school isn't actually teaching her how to think to any serious degree.

It's teaching her how to intuit answers to standardized questions, certainly a useful skill to possess, but she also needs to be tackling problems too big to just "do" so that she can understand the thought processes and develop the methods to do complex thinking.

Actually being fluent in a programming language and writing a piece of software is something that I see as a sort of side effect; useful, certainly, but not the main goal.

Are there other ways to foster this sort of "big picture' thinking? Sure, but programming is what we know, so it's the vehicle we will use to teach her the skills we feel she needs to have, but isn't getting.

As someone who often works alone, one of the best things I've done is to find someone else to share code, problems, and ideas with on a regular basis, even though we're not working on the same projects. It's helped me grow as a developer, has improved my mood, and has also just been an enjoyable.

But I still really do think it is important to make sure there's one day a week where you don't touch anything related to work or code.

Reddit discourages people who don't participate in the community from just posting links, to prevent spam. The more active you are, the more frequently you can submit things.

And a lot of people won't click links from new accounts, under the (usually correct) assumption that they're just spam.

There is a particular dislike for blog spam.

You can certainly become a new member of Reddit. It just takes some work at actually being a member, and not just self-promoting.

For me, I found the changing color to be too distracting. My eye was constantly being drawn away from the text I was reading to another color on a line below or above.

It may be worth noting that I only have one eye, and it's not a very good one - 20/100 visual acuity with about a 15deg. visual field.

You would have seen my family doing this a couple of weeks ago (well, except we have one kid). We were stuck there for 12hrs, and we were playing a game together, on our respective phones.

I get the sentiment, though, and I feel the same way about photography, which is why I don't often take pictures when we're doing family activities--I don't want to stop having fun with my family long enough to take them.

We both share a love of strategy gaming, we're both introverts, atheists, liberal. Neither of us are particularly outdoorsy or sporty. He's much better at math, and I'm much more expressive, artistically.

He plays more video games than I do and I watch more documentaries than he does. He's a bit of a dreamer. I'm a bit more pragmatic.

We both have a very similar sense of humor.

We both have our own particular hobbies/interests that the other doesn't share, though. Sometimes I think it would be nice if we did, but I think the differences are also probably very important and healthy, too.

As a not particularly attractive, introvert, female developer who has been rather successful in my career, I don't feel like I've missed out on any opportunities because of those traits.... and if I have, they're probably people I wouldn't want to work with, anyway.

That way I can dedicate enough large blocks of time to the projects to really get some good work done and my clients know exactly when to expect to be able to reach me and when to be getting updates from me.

Of course, every now and then emergencies or major deadlines happen, but for the most part, I try to set a schedule and stick to it.