Since I started Flatiron school one of the challenges that I have faced was retaining the concepts. Programming is in depth and learning how, and when to use the methods, classes, iterations, initializations can become difficult to keep up with. So through some of my interactions with my peers I found that a lot of us were having the same problems, trying to remember where the methods that we were taught are located in the flatiron labs so that I could recall it again, and maybe reuse it.
As a newbie coder I initially found this difficult to accomplish. When beginning bootcamp I said to myself “ I’m starting school let me get a notebook, and some pens so that I will be prepared..” lol. Writing code in a notebook is difficult and I found it not to be practical. Then how can I test it? I was more likely to make some sort of error. So that whole write it down thought was a fail!.
Step two type it out. Much better approach but I still lacked organization so had to think again. Someone suggested using OneNote to organize myself. I never heard of it, mind you, I have Microsoft suite . I took their advice and my notes began to transform. So currently in my OneNote I have my coding notebook. My sections are organized by the Flatiron sections and my pages are my labs. The beauty is that now I use snippets to showcase a completed lab that is easily accessible to me and visually looks the same way it did when I wrote it in my IDE.
Digging deeper, just having a snippet of my code was not doing enough in term of retain information. I now also decided to incorporate code analysis within the pages of each lab. My code analysis is the step by step analysis of my code method by method . It serves as a reminder of what I was thinking, how a specific iteration may have been conducted, and a deeper look into the code using binding.pry snips. I also include that test that were passed on this lab on the page. This serves for dual purposes. One, if I have a similar test I can search key words and will be able to locate a code that I already used, tested, and I might be able to reuse that similar code. All I would need to so is refactor it per situation. Secondly, I can always see what test that specific method was able to pass.
My new code note taking notebook, or dev library has become extremely beneficial to my learning process. I know that we are told to google the information that we are unclear about. I found that when googling I did not always understand what they were trying to explain. This form of notetaking allows me to write in my own words what something means when I understand it and before I get so involved in another topic that I may forget crucial pieces of information. So I search my dev library first to see If I am able to help myself then I go to google!