DEV Community: Jesse Calton

What are your metrics for successful learning?

Jesse Calton — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 19:36:26 +0000

Do you ever take on a learning track and sooner or later realize just how big the mountain is? Maybe you spend 3 months with your nose to the grindstone only to look up and see that you are nowhere near where you thought you'd be after 3 months, despite all the effort you put in.

I think as programmers, we naturally look for the most efficient way to do something. Even when we've optimized our learning, there's still no replacement for the time and elbow grease required.

What are your metrics for success when pursuing a new learning track? How do you move the goal post if you realized you've bitten off more than you can chew?

Maybe you have no metric for success, and your metric is more akin to spending 30 minutes a day working on X, 5 days a week.

The Google Doodle Games - Open Sourced?

Jesse Calton — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 19:54:11 +0000

Have you played the Halloween game on Google's home page? It's super clever. I love the little interactive doodles they do.

I've been wanting to get into making (relatively) simple games like that. I'm wondering if Google has public repositories for their interactive doodles. Does anyone know?

My Recipe For Learning

Jesse Calton — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 19:19:36 +0000

I've recently reflected on my learning process. Even though I'm always finding new insights as to how I best learn, I feel I'm at a point where I've established a good groove when it comes to gradual and methodical improvement.

I hope to make blogging a regular practice as I continue reflecting on my growth as a developer.

In this post, I talk about getting out of tutorial hell, how I stay motivated, how I best retain information, and to embrace your shitty first project as a learning experience.

Hope it speaks to you!
https://medium.com/@jessecalton/my-recipe-for-learning

Interview Cake's Full Course is $29 for 12 months of access

Jesse Calton — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 16:28:46 +0000

As someone who does not have a computer science degree, Interview Cake was an amazing service to help fill those knowledge gaps. I highly recommend it to all my bootcamp friends (and CS-degree friends) who are on the job hunt.

I first used it 3 years ago when I was fresh out of bootcamp. It was amazing back then, but they've added a lot more helpful content and have built-in test cases for each algorithm now.

What I love most about it is that you can see the examples in the language of your choice. In other words, if you select JavaScript as your language, every code example will be in JavaScript, unlike some sites where you have to "transpose" the example content from Java or C++ to the language you are working with.

They really do a great job of "showing you the door" to the answer, eventually revealing the best solution (taking space and time complexity into consideration).

Since practicing data structures and algorithms is nobody's favorite thing, I like how they keep things light with clever scenarios for each algorithm. For instance, the combining sorted arrays problem has a "selling girl scout cookies" backstory, and subsequent related variable names.

It's down from it's regular $249 for 12 months of access, as well as a free trial, but if for whatever reason you hate it, they've got a money-back guarantee. ✌️

Not an endorsement. I'm just a regular guy trying to help his fellow job-hunting dev.