Skip to main content

Read This Book & Failure, What Failure?

A Book

I picked up Austin Kleon's latest book "Show Your Work".  It's such a great book for those that are creative, would like to be creative and those looking to expand their options.  Wrapped in a wonderful compact and easy to read format, "Show Your Work" outlines and explains the steps to be more open and how to grow.

These lessons are how to grow your self and what to avoid (vampires, you know who they are).   It's cheap and well worth the read.

Failure?

We (aka I) try to minimize failure, but this got me thinking.  Maybe it's not failure or success that, I kind of, track in the back of my mind.  It's all learning that I want and the heck with with works or fails (at least the first 50 rounds).  I was watching a show on the "Code Camps" and a reporting learning some basic JS code.  The teacher prepped the reported that they might try an operation 50 times before understanding the correct usage of a function.  Yeah, that sounds about right.

On learning programming, you type in some code, try it out, repeat until you understand who it all works.  It's a long process. Code / Test / Repeat.  It's the old development cycle and it's mostly filled with failure or partial failure, but every cycle brings you closer to success.

It's not the failure that drives you, it's the learning along the way.





Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Current Desktop and Happy Vining.

It's been a big switch when I quit my old procession (Software Engineer) and ventured into the unknown.  So this is my current desktop.   First it's a REAL desktop and not a computer screen. Second, I've had to learn a whole new set of tools.  You would think a pencil is just a pencil and a paint brush is just a paint brush, but noooooo, they are tools into you mind and that's what needs re-tooling. The tactual nature of these tools and operation as much more rewarding (and frustrating too) than typing code in an IDE.   That had it's incentive but that well went dry and life changes,  so I changed. The pleasure of creating colors (no RGB involved) ad hoc wise is interesting.  Getting the technique to merge them on paper is very tough.  You do not know what you're going to get, so you just have to go with it. I'm glad that I can do a lot of other things instead of Software, but I hope that others in my past procession work on other pa...

3rd Try is a Charm

I've been trying to draw / paint these barns for a couple of years but never felt or got them right.  This time I think they turned out right. So What went wrong before and what's right now with this drawing?  This time, the light was right.  It's coming from the upper right and the shadows just looked right.  The other thing is the corn field on the left had to "be in season", otherwise it's just a plowed field.  I had taken other photos from different angles but they never felt right.  This angle has the road, power lines, corn field, etc. all leading to the right.  The shadows on the lower right helps fill in that corner (don't forget about the corners!).  The last part is trying to draw (ink paint maybe) the trees in the background.  Not so easy when they are kind of a blob is green shades. So yeah, it's composition that is king.  Many times I just don't see it until the drawing / painting is finished and when it's right it feels goo...

Thought Patterns

I know how I work.  How a think about, visualize a problem and go about mentally design a solution and implement it in code.  My thought pattern works pretty well for me on most occasions, but not always. There are times when I have a force myself to change my thought pattern because of the problem I'm solving requires a different mindset.  Anyway, this posting is about how I work most of the time.  Here is goes. I quickly break down a feature into operations that are required to exists and tackle that code first.  My thinking is that, if I can solve the primary issues first, then secondary features will fall into "known knowns" and I can address those at anytime (and sometimes at my leisure) and this allows me to meet my internal timeline. If I addressed features and operations that are not primary first, then I feel I risk my (and the projects) timeline without addressing issues that allow the feature to operate.  You may have seen this occur where...