In an effort to “build up my weaknesses until they become strong points”, I am diving in to concepts that I initially misunderstood to some degree. I refer to these concepts as “black boxes” because, at some point, I didn’t know how they really worked. You can build on a lot of these black boxes without running into trouble, until something breaks any you have no idea why. Maybe this is how you feel about your car or your refrigerator or your interpersonal relationships. For me, the first target will ActiveRecord scopes specifically because they eluded me during a livecoding session (L’s were taken, many “umms” were said.)
Throughout my coding journey, I have had an eye on how these new skills can be leveraged in the service of education. From educational tools, to productivity tools aimed at educators, I feel I have a unique handle on what students and teachers need to be more effective and to create deeper learning experiences. Perhaps the most critical skill in all of education is that of reading. Nearly all educational and professional endeavors require reading, and reading for understanding.
Back in my self-guided coding days, I would have said that JavaScript was my native language. Though the initial learning curve was higher than that of Ruby or Python, I feel like all the syntactic breadcrumbs helped me to pay attention to the details of the code I was writing. It was great training for the idea that the computer only performs exactly the actions you instruct it to (and only if it’s all followed by a semi-colon).