For the past two days, I've been paired with an awesome classmate on a really tough sprint. This sprint was all about utilizing and creating callback functions in Node. It turns out this is something that's just not intuitive for me, and even now, I feel like I only kinda get what's going on and how those callbacks really operate. It's taken a lot of energy to even get to where I am in my limited comprehension -- sifting through documents and our codebase, and watching a helpful solution video.
I've found it all really hard to parse.
Well, not my pair partner. While I'm tracing the callbacks and trying to mentally stitch together the function interactions, she's a step ahead, actually connecting those functions in the code editor. It's not like she was flying through it, but she was navigating the work adeptly.
Which was a bit of a surprise given our initial pair session meeting. She described feeling really behind on a recent sprint, like she was playing catch-up on the material the whole way. That was on material (React) that I felt some resistance on, but ultimately now feel pretty confident with.
Who was this person that struggles on thing A but rocks thing B, when I have it the other way around? How do I make sense of this situation?
It's an important question. A person's confidence in this program, and indeed with code in general, can wax and wane from sprint-to-sprint, hour-to-hour, function-to-function. Those slips in confidence are counter-productive, and I think illusory. You're no worse a programmer now than when you felt really good about your progress the day before. The highs are probably non-productive to some degree, too.
I think what I'm observing in my partner's and my own inverse experiences throughout recent work is that consistency is the goal. But it's really hard to achieve in something that you're new to. I think it's also that we're not just who we are right now, but who we've been over X time period. You might screw up, but that doesn't make you a screw-up. And you might do something great, but that doesn't make you great.
What I'm aiming for is to improve, yes, but also to improve my consistency. It's hard to separate the two, but I think they're distinct. Another way to frame it is: am I trending in the right direction?
I believe I am.
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