I have served my current school district as an Instructional Data Coach for the past two school years. Recently, I was lucky enough to chat with a director of instructional technology from a large, elite university. She started our conversation with the following question: “So, what is a Data Coach?” I had the thought that if someone of her background and experience doesn’t know, perhaps a more thorough explanation might be in order of this emerging role.
Patch requests not working but everything else is fine? Maybe you have the same problem I did.
Let’s say you’d like to implement an update route on a resource in a React-Rails app. You’ve got actions all set to go in the controller; just waiting patiently to update a section resource:
Coding can be really rewarding and it can also be really intimidating. It can challenge you in extremely unique and frustrating ways. It can also make you feel isolated if you let it. If you are someone who is new to coding and you’re not sure if is for you, you have to go to a meetup! Here’s why it will inspire you, encourage you, or just refill your coder tank.
As a self-taught coder for the first four years, I created lots of little one-off projects, mainly in my role as a teacher. I made lots of small tutorials, examples, boilerplates and challenges for students in my classes and clubs to explore. In this teaching role, I had plenty of experience planning, building, iterating, and refining these projects with and for students. However I never really had to take any one of them that final 40 ft and actually deploy them to the masses; for use by people beyond those that helped build it.
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.)