What can be your greatest strength as a coder?

I think its thinking with a mindset that you are writing a book.

Being willing to learn more and accepting constructive criticism. Accepting constructive criticism is very, very, important if you wish to be a coder. It doesnā€™t matter if the person is less experienced than you. If they have a fair point, youā€™ve got to accept what they said.

Another thing you never want to accept is that youā€™re satisfied where you are with your coding knowledge. There is always so much more you can learn if you only reach out your hand and try. Iā€™ve been coding for awhile now and Iā€™ve learned a lot but there is always so much more you can learn.

A couple years ago, I tried to create a textarea that when you clicked on some buttons, it would add that letter to the textarea. But unfortunately, I only knew HTML, so I spent hours making a separate HTML page for each letter. Now, I could do that in a couple minutes with JavaScript.

Another example, a couple days ago I posted a reply to a question which asked why the input element did not require a closing tag. I, being pretty experienced with HTMl, replied that it did have a closing tag (referring to the slash and closing angle bracket <input />). Pretty soon after that, someone sent me an article explaining that actually, the slash before the angle bracket was not required, thus showing that no ending tag.

As you can see, there are two responses to that. One is to get all high and mighty about it and not accept the constructive criticism. OR you can accept that because youā€™re a human, youā€™re not gonna know everything, and accept that you were wrong and try to learn from your error.

I guess thatā€™s a couple different things, but all of them are required if you want to become a successful coder. Basically what Iā€™m saying is, your greatest strengths would be your willingness to learn and being able to accept criticism from anyone.

Anyways, hope this gives you something to think about!
Steven

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Thereā€™s no need to accept unconstructive criticism, if someone just wants to rail at you for no good reason. Itā€™s also advice that applies across every aspect of oneā€™s life, I think. If you canā€™t accept constructive criticism, youā€™ll likely not grow much in whatever aspect it is youā€™re trying to improve. :+1:

To add to what @stevencopeland has said, though, as well as being able to accept constructive criticism and feedback on your work, you also need to be willing to accept that youā€™re not going to be able to do everything immediately.

One of the things Iā€™ve found helpful, though your mileage may vary, is to set myself a ā€œchallengeā€ of sorts. The whole reason I know any programming languages at all is because I thought ā€œI wonder if I can build/code/design/program Xā€ā€¦ then went off and learnt how to do it. Codecademy has been great for getting the basics of several things down, but along the way to getting my hobby projects off the ground Iā€™ve bought numerous books and spent goodness knows how long reading documentation and articles to figure out how to do stuff.

In short, being willing to put in the time to get better and constantly improve what you can do will make you a better programmer. :slight_smile:

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Your greatest strength as a code is reading these long answers :grin:

Just kidding, but you should read these answers!

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One word. Patience

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ā€œBeing playful and willing to explore thingsā€

Seriously. The amount of stuff I have learned over the years has been a result of of goofing off and mucking around with whatever I am learning. Today I spent what some may call ā€˜way too much timeā€™ on question 4 in the ā€˜Mini Linterā€™ Javascript project. Instead of just using the ā€˜if statementā€™ solution provided in the walk through video, I thought to myself ā€œHow would I do this so that if the original list of overused words changes, my code will automatically adapt?ā€ The end result? I managed to write the below snippet of code using the iterating functions that the previous lessons dealt with. This in turn led to me better understand how they worked.

// Create array to store count of overusedWords with the same indexing as the original array.
let overusedWordCount = overusedWords.map(word => {
  return 0;
});
// Declare function to increment each count in thd overusedWordCount array if the word is in the overusedWords array
let overusedWordCountIncrement = (word) => {
  i = overusedWords.indexOf(word);
  if (i > 0){
   overusedWordCount[i] += 1; 
  } 
};
// Read through each word in the array storyWords and pass the word to the overusedWordIncrement function.
for (word of storyWords){
  overusedWordCountIncrement(word);
};
// Read the overused words to the screen as text from two arrays
for (let i = 0; i < overusedWords.length; i++) {
  console.log(`${overusedWords[i]} : ${overusedWordCount[i]}`);
};
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My greatest strength is probably the encouragement I receive from my family, especially my dad, who installed Python on the computer, gave me a manual, and told me to get coding. (and who got me hooked up with 10+ coding courses which I burned through, the newest of which is Codecademy. Which is super awesome and definitely isnā€™t going to be in any way easy to ā€œburn throughā€ but completely worthwhile. Also, I appreciate how Codecademy turns it not into ā€œjust a courseā€ you finish, but continue to hone and practice. Thanks, Codecademy!! But anyway, I digressā€¦)

Anyway, support helps. Also I just love coding. So thatā€™s also quite helpful. :slightly_smiling_face:

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