A new partner
Sometimes, you meet people and you feel that it is just right. Yesterday I was to pair with Irene. There are not a lot of people I did not work with, but Irene was one of them. I was looking forward to pair with her, her experience with web dev, and the examples of work she had accomplished is just impressing to me (Like this for instance : Iren So, we paired and it was a very fulfilling pairing session, in terms of partnership mainly. e’s Site)). Plus, so far I only heard nice things about her! In the end, I just loved my day, but you’ll see more about that in the next paragraphs. Plus, she knows a bit of french (Every time she tries some french words I realize she knows even more than I thought, very impressive). Some would say that I should not have been intimated, or even go as far as saying things about great minds thinking alike… But I don’t think so.
Experience vs Mastery
For me, people make experience when working the right way, learning, experimenting, on one particular topic. There is no limit to how far you could go in such a topic, and broadening your learning will always take you to strange places, more skills, more experience, and for me, more fun!
Now, I do have some skills. I won’t brag about it, but I don’t see any reason to have some false modesty. I have, indeed, been playing with computers for 27 good years so far. I have been developing, at a slow pace for 2 years now. My job has also been to spot and maybe fix bugs in the program my company was making for the lat 2 years.
But all that does not make me a genius. The only thing it gets me is experience. No mastery, no great mind, nothing like that.
Irene has been doing some web development for a while, and that also does not make her a genius. She is, however, much more experienced than I am in web development, and web design. If you take Stephen, he is much more experienced in video games, and Armando in asian cuisine!
In the end, people have experience, and every experience is different. There is no shame in having none in one topic, and lack of experience should just push you to want to learn more.
In the end, I was too impressed by Irene, and I should not have, but we also both had that feeling that people tend to put us on pedestals because of some of our experience, sometimes. She was apparently just as intimidated, and in a way I think that helped us connect much more easily. All in all… Good times and a awesome pairing session, Sacrebleu!
Sudoku!
So, I made code that solves sudokus. Hunter had been working on an algorithm thought by Peter Norvig, former director of search quality at Google. As with the experience I was talking about in the 2nd paragraph, Hunter has much more than me in math and algorithm thinking and design.
The idea is that :
– You first fill in every cell that has only one possible value.
– You then take all the boxes, rows, and columns, and try to find if any possible values can take only one location in one of these groups, and then set it to this cell.
– If you did not find anything, just guess one number, taking all the cells with the smallest number of possible values, and fix them one by one, before calling the first step again. If it did not work, you get back on this part, restore the board, and fix the next one.
I could spend hours talking about that, but in the end… I solve 170 puzzles, among which 95 “hards”, and the 11 harvests, all that in 8.5 seconds.
If you want any more info, don’t hesitate to ask. I think I’ll be showing how I did to my cohort very soon anyway.