How do you approach learning something new, like a new technology?
Typically if the documentation is clear either on its own site or github repo I will start there especially for the installation of requirements. If things start to get a bit more confusing then I will check on YouTube for a tutorial if I think this could be a very long learning process to get the basics and then straight to Googling the questions that come up. More recently with chatGPT which I will expand on more, I have used it for various cases where it has been very helpful and other times where I felt like I was wasting time trying to think of how to ask a question so it would understand vs what normally would work in google to pull up a StackOverflow example. As far as time to learn stuff, I like to stick to 50 minutes on and 10 minutes off to not be overwhelmed and this cycle has helped me stay focused longer than just trying to power through. I usually get burnt out after about 3 hours max where as I can go significantly longer learning new material or just working in general following the 50/10 method.
Do you use chatGPT or other AI tools? In what way?
Yes, I have found that the use of chatGPT has sped up my production time quite a bit but at the same time for a little bit I felt like I was relying on it too much in such an important stage of my career I started to use it less. I found that I was getting more done but when asked to change something about the code I had chatGPT write it too just as long to understand it as it would have to originally learn it. This was a learning curve for sure as the tools are great until you are asked to be the expert on what you “wrote”. I can see this causing issues in the future if users are not careful to understand what is being produced before copy/ pasting and just trying to ship as soon as possible.
I think the mobile version of this would be a great idea because you typically are not doing meaningful work on your phone other than messaging so an app would be essentially like google to quickly get an answer for recipes, a heated debate, or just casual questions alike.
What are some debugging methods you use. Do they usually work?
Right now I always quickly default to the good ole print method of debugging. This is a quick way to check what is happening in that moment what what values you have set to variables across the file. Another more recent way I have been using Python though is through Jupyter Notebooks and that has been pretty great since you can essentially debug every cell. It has been really helpful recently with this class and my work for data manipulation, checking to see what is inside the different pandas data frames after merges and such.
