Pretty, pretty good day today. First, I got to do pair-programming with Tyler (and long-time reader of this blog know of my high opinion of pair-programming) and after lunch, I worked together with Zyma and could watch her SQL skills.
I noticed why I like it so much to watch somebody work: I get to know their style of working, their common short cuts, how they organize their desktop, their browser, their work. I can observe in which regards they’re faster than I am and in which regards slower. I can observe how they think about a problem, how they approach it, how they come to the solution. When they see a big problem where I see only a small one, I can wonder how many times it’s the other way round. Basically, it teaches me: Things are relative. There are many ways towards a solution. And many mindsets to have on the way towards it.
Also, Zyma and I build a map! And boy do I love maps. Also, boy do maps tell LITTLE as a data visualisation. We decided that we can extract almost zero value out of the map and that we will try a line chart tomorrow.
Two especially great things happened today:
1) I got a terminal based program running and it returned the stuff I wanted in less than 2min of trial and error. That never happened before, so fast.
2) I read this article by Bill Rapp (who will speak at the Data Vis DC Meetup tomorrow, which of course I will visit), and I liked it. Also, I disagreed with it and wrote a response (something I do very rarely) and writing that response and the response to Bill’s response to my response made me understand very much in little time.
Input? 5
Output? 4
Learnings?
Investing in other poker players is a thing. (Thanks, Planet Money Podcast)
Git stash lets you save a copy of your stuff in another location, so that you don’t overwrite it.
“Specificity is wind in your sails; ambiguity is storm clouds on the horizon.” says Bill. A poetic reminder that goals are important. Another thing I’ve learned at Tapestry: “It’s so much easier to achieve a goal if you have one.” I LOVE that sentence.
Questions?
How should I set my priorities? Working with Zyma on maps and data today made me realize that I could do that for the rest of my time here and would enjoy it a lot. But I chose that fellowship to set myself some pressure, to achieve something that might be different from “slowly rising my data vis skills”. Basically, I’m doing this fellowship to learn something different than from what I could have learned in my old jobs. To think about bigger stuff. Maybe I should focus more on the “What is journalism?” discussion. I think it can have potential, and I feel like I haven’t found a satisfying answer yet. It’s astonishing how blurry this whole concept of Journalism still is to me. Maybe I should write my blog post, to get some thoughts out there and to learn from the responses to them?
Should I manage these questions I have (about Journalism etc.) as issues in Github? Seeing Tyler working on Github Issues and Pull Requests today made me consider this experiment. I could write short answers and get pull requests on them. Hm. Not sure if this works. I should do some research into “not code related Github projects”.