My pc, my cats and me

Blog about my journey learning things and surviving life in general

• on Blog, Feelings, Learningtocode profile image for mairandomness by mairandomness

First things first

my pc my cats and me

It’s been a while since I last had a blog…​ And English is not my first language, so I probably should be spellchecking this…​ But right now I’m mostly setting up this blog and looking at how it works in general, and maybe thinking about how to make it look cooler…​ Maybe I can draw something?

Okay.. Introductions?

My name is Maira Kodama, 27 yo.
Born: May 30th, 1989 around 7 PM local time São Paulo -SP
I’m not much of an astrology person, but I like a lot of people that are, so I think it’s nice to have this out here.
My favorite things about my birthday are:
--- it’s Saint Joan of Arc’s day which I personally think is pretty ironic, her being a saint and all
--- it’s Mikhail Bakunin’s birthday as well

I’m a non-binary person, who usually presents as femme (I accept female pronouns, but I like the neutral ones better). I have a Teaching degree in Mathematics from the University of São Paulo and I have been working with education (in a way or another) for the last 10 years.
Right now, I feel that to continue to be a teacher in traditional schools I’d suffer too much or become desensitized. I don’t like any of those options, so I’m mostly back to studying and trying to understand (as a student) how I feel about less traditional ways of learning, in which I feel like an active agent of my own education, something that never happened before. And this has been amazing so far :)

I think that feeling competent in your line of work is a great feeling that I really want to have in my life at all times (if possible). I’m not able to feel like a great teacher.. and worse: I don’t think that I can become what I consider to be a great teacher right now. So I want to try other things and try to be good in doing them, in the worse case scenario I’ll become more of a generalist, which is already an amazing accomplishment <3

So…​ What have I been learning?

Mostly programming related things.
I remember how much fun I had doing programming classes in college, it was frustrating but FUN!
I also remember that at the time the work/life balance of programmers was famous for being awful, so I never really wanted to work with it.
But now…​ I see so many amazing people working in companies that are really great cultural wise. And there are so many awesome ways to learn new things!

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What I have done so far:

I was never much of a self-driven person and even though I really want to learn new things I’ve also learned that (for now) structure and deadlines help me accomplish things. I honestly think this is a bad habit that comes with traditional school (even though some people don’t develop it) and I feel good about trying to deconstruct it without much hurry

  • spent some time learning a little (emphasis on little) bit of javascript, last year I got a scholarship to do Fullstack Academy online, didn’t go through with it, it was a lot of money and full-time, which would mean quitting my job as a teacher immediately. Beside having mixed feelings about boot camps and how they seem to deliberately make things hard to keep up because allegedly being desperate turns people into better learners.

  • an MITx course on introductory programming in python. It was nice, it reminded me from my CS 101 in college, that was in C and it was 10 years ago, didn’t remember much. I have some prejudice against python and the whole "there should be only one right way of doing things" ordeal, but the syntax is super clean and I have been told that it’s pretty great for whiteboarding.

  • learned a bit on HTML and CSS, bootstrap on freecodecamp and Udacity. I love the way freecodecamp works, don’t like the exercises too much. But the idea of getting a certificate after you help a non-profit with your newly acquired skills is something that I really like.

What I am doing:

  • I’m midway through the second course of MITx, called Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science. It still reminds me of college, and it’s fun (for me at least)

  • started Udacity’s Design of Computer Programs that is taught by Peter Norvig, his insights on problems are awesome

  • started an Elm introductory course, didn’t like the course in particular. But I do want to learn Functional programming and I think that Elm is a good start point, some of the knowledge is transferable to Haskell. So I’ll finish it eventually

  • still going through some things in freecodecamp, never really did any projects

  • decided to keep a blog on this thing.

  • got in 42, the piscine sounded INTENSE and cool, so I applied. At first, I thought of only attending the piscine. But the idea of doing some of the actual school program is growing on me.

What I REALLY want to do from now:

  • read The Imposter’s Handbook by Rob Conery

  • read some of The Good Math by Mark C. Chu-Carroll

  • learn some Lambda Calculus

  • learn some Haskell (?)

  • understand monads

  • get a better understanding on the whole dealing with C and memory handling ordeal

  • get better at this self-learning thing. So I can apply to The Recurse Center, which sounds like an awesome place. My husband attended last year and it was an experience

I guess that’s it for now. I think I’ll update this eventually, with new wants and in progress things. We’ll see :3