What are three new things you have learnt about yourself and your ego due to the core learning?

• That I already practiced some of it, more than I realised, despite being a little sceptical.
• I have more capacity for self reflection than I thought. Learning from thinking about yourself sounds facetious, but has actually been really helpful at developing more empathy for myself, and better self care habits.
• I have a typical extrovert ego I think, a lot of bluster, a lot of hidden self doubt. I have found journaling, reflection, and mindfulness is doing a lot to make sure I am internally the confident person I portray outwardly, as I now have evidence of my abilities and myself overcoming challenges.

What are the role of values, empathy, and self-awareness in learning and programming?

Values, empathy, and self-awareness are important skills in learning, programming, and life in general. Values help us prioritise what is important, and how to weight decisions. Empathy is needed for anything collaborative, group projects, pair programming, conversations, literally any interaction with other people is a collaboration. Self-awareness about our abilities, strengths, weaknesses, are important for knowing what challenges you can overcome, when you need help, and how far you can push.

What has surprised you the most about the core learning?

I was surprised to learn that my leftie, socialist, and all around feelie values are pretty closely reflected in the core learnings. What is it like when your initial reaction walking into a room is "I wish everyone well in this room"? It IS good.

What were the most challenging aspects of the core learning?

The most challenging was blogging and reflecting without just bashing out bland nothings or making lots of jokes. To really think about yourself and your learning is a little confronting, but I got there.

Why do you think we, a programming school, are spending so much time focusing on core learning in a web development Bootcamp course?

Technical skills alone are not enough in a collaborative environment, and good communication is honestly preferable to a highly skilled coder, because to get things done, you need to get them done TOGETHER.

Does the time you spent studying core learning here feel like a waste of time? Should you have just used that time to practise programming instead? Justify your answer.

Not at all, I honestly wish all schooling focused on 'core' skills as much, maybe we would have more self aware, empathetic people walking around. I think there was enough programming in this first week to get the concepts needed across, whereas a lot of people may not have had any exposure to these ways of thinking, so it is important to weight it as such. My justification is that tech is well known to be a stressful industry, so self awareness and empathy are going to help a lot in that environment.

28/04/2022