Polyglot Programming, Week 2

Teamwork makes the dreamwork. Cheesy, but alas, that is my main takeaway from this week. The polyglot programming week gave us the challenge of solving the qualification round of the Google Code Jam 2021 in 5 different programming languages. The whole apprentice team needed to coordinate in order to ensure each of the 5 problems was solves in each language. This was an awesome experience, on one hand because I was able to learn about a whole new programming language, Kotlin; but also, because this gave me the unique opportunity to solve programming challenges alongside my peers. I had never done this before, and while unfortunately I didn’t have the insight to ask for help and start cooperating sooner (I waste 2 days trying to solve it on my own), at the end we worked together to figure out a solution, share our ideas and finally fulfilled our responsibility. Lesson learned, swallow your pride and ask for help sooner, programming together was quite a joyful experience.

Continuing on the more technical side, this week we learned though a couple of videos about the basic (and advanced) theory behind the compression algorithms we use. We continued the missing semester of the bash shell, on which we continued to learn more advanced tools, commands and scripts.

Regarding technical talks, we took a bunch of talks from the Google I/O developer conference form the charismatic duo of Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman. These talks were incredibly inspirational, as they allowed me to see a broader picture of what it means to be a developer in a company, the roles it takes to be one and the incredible importance of having the right social skills in order to effectively work with other people. Other videos I saw this week talked about the adoption of a “best” programming language (it really depends, but aim for variety), as well as the concept of the Dreyfus Model, an interesting concept that tracks the journey from novice to expert in a quite interesting manner, as it gives insight into what each step of the way requires to make the best out of its position.

Finally, on the social side, we had some very interesting talks from Linda Rising, a chemist, mathematician and computer scientist (at 50 years of age!) with some rather thoughtful insights into the agile mindset and the plasticity of the brain. Her talks also touched on stereotypes and trust, the experiments about the Muslim and Christian boys in Beirut and the influence of stereotypes on people were very interesting to me, it also reminded me of a study on this topic about Asian American women and the power of both harmful and positive stereotypes on their math ability. The last series of videos was about the idea of remixing, copying and transforming. These videos were honestly a treat, and they made me rethink what creativity is really all about.

In conclusion, this was a very intense but very insightful week, I hope the next ones can be as exciting as this one! Here are my notes for the week.