Over the last week, I got some coding work done (and had a lot of great interactions with Recursers, as always!) but I realized that toning down my social appearances wasn’t quite enough to get me where I wanted to be, coding-speed-wise. To copy from my checkin on Zulip last Friday:
“At this point, I feel like I probably need to work alone more often in order to make faster progress on my coding. I think it's important to pair some, because I treasure basically every personal interaction and pairing that I've had here so far, but I'm a slow coder already, and it seems like balancing pairing with getting some good forward coding progress is important. So I'll try one pairing a day next week and see how that goes.”
Which I’ve tried over the last couple of days, and it is working better so far! I’m getting more code done by working by myself sometimes. So I’m cautiously optimistic this might be the right balance.
Are Elixir and Phoenix still a good fit? I learned an important lesson last week, actually: Phoenix shares a lot of similarities with Ruby on Rails. This makes sense if you know some of the history with Chris McCord, the creator of Phoenix. I think a lot of the missing pieces for me mentally (which I think aren’t always well-covered in the Phoenix documentation) slotted into place when a fellow Recurser (thanks so much Russell!) told me this thing and outlined a lot of the similarities.
As a result, Russell also encouraged me to look at Phoenix’s code generation to simplify my Phoenix development and make my app a more idiomatic Phoenix app. (He was able to identify the codegen’s usefulness due, again, to many similarities it apparently shares with similar functionality with Ruby on Rails.) So now I’m going to take his awesome advice and learn on my own for a bit about these awesome codegen tools! Which means I’m continuing to put my strategy into place. 🙂 And this knowledge makes me feel a lot better about Phoenix, too.
Finally, I just wanted to mention a random awesome website I got last week from another Recurser: a monad tutorial for people who have read too many monad tutorials. After a lot of years of struggling to understand monads, THIS was finally the piece of writing that got them to click my mind. And it did that by shaking an awful lot of confused thinking out of my brain. When I say that the Recurse Center has helped me in some unexpected and awesome ways, this is the kind of thing I mean!
Next week I hope to have some cool codegen knowledge to share, as well as some additional functionality that that codegen helps me build! But I’m getting my second COVID booster in a couple of days, which may slow me down a bit. I’ll try to be kind to myself if it knocks me for a loop like I’ve seen it do with a few other people already. See you next week!