I came here to say this, but @melissafisher did a great job with it.
If I find something that I see, then do with an actual purpose (beyond just learning) then I am in a much better place for learning, otherwise I’m likely to be in trouble.
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@christovskia and @melissafisher yes I agree, exercises are much better than visuals. Visuals seem to encourage memorising things, but it’s near on impossible to memorise everything all at once! It all comes with practise
@anon68517856 I’m not sure exactly what you mean by making me a plan for preparing me for work… I knew I was going to be the only tester on my (small) squad with other testers in the company, and I knew a lot of my direction would be fed by them and clients I would be working with. The not clicking is more the fact I am constantly finding myself going over the same things.
Although, things are getting a little easier this week… that, or I’m being more optimistic. Either way, I consider it a win!
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By plan, I mean a set of time-limited goals for you and how you can accomplish them. This could give you clear direction & help you to focus better. But, I am not sure if this kind of planning will be applicable to your situation. e.g. Within 3 months, learn selenium and automate “basic” use cases for Linkedin with the help of a mentor.
If you find yourself going over the same things, then try these things.
1 - Try to make short notes (or find other’s notes).
Making notes can be hard & might feel like its slowing your learning. But it can help you to recap things quickly. Besides, if you make a lot of good notes, you might be able to put them into a blog or book and make money later. As an aside, you can enlighten others.
2 - Try to practice with challenging & realistic examples.
Make your own small projects and/or or take project oriented courses to master things. Find websites or books which give you the right kind and right amount of examples to master concepts.
Good luck.
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great topic. I’m here to follow along.
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On my timeline I found this tweet about Imposter Syndrome and programmming
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Sometimes I have the same feelings about myself, people are expecting me to know the things I don’t know and be as fast as others who probably spent more time on automation than I did. Every tutorial or course was too much or too fast for me. it seems like the world is all about growing fast and they forgot about me, I learn slowly but steady. and I thought I just can’t learn more about automation at all and then I found FreeCodeCamp. It’s like someone finally considered that people might really start something (in my case instance javascript) and have absolutely no idea about it. so it’s a brilliant course for me.
Another thing that really helped me with my team was pair programming, or more accurately ensemble programming. I learned a lot by just doing what my colleagues where telling me to do.
Always remember, Quality assurance is everyone’s job, you might not bring the highest coding skills but you definitely have some skill. So don’t be too hard on yourself
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Definitely this, and it’s also why I always tell people to work on eating an elephant. Take the small bites in your day to day tasks: learn how to write batch files or shell scripts so you can simplify your environment setup/teardown, learn how to write a wrapper script to drive some SQL, convert those shell scripts to a programming language and add parameters and more logic, etc. This lets you learn on the job, as well as forcing it to be incremental.
The pattern that so many follow of thinking they’re going to learn just enough coding so they can write some Selenium scripts results in so many painful knowledge gaps. I get that this may be enough to get you a new job, but as an interviewer, I’m always wary of these folks, as they’ll often have a ton of bad habits that need to be broken. Often, these types only have a metaphorical hammer, and haven’t figured out how to actually be an engineer. i.e. I’ve seen way too many candidates who come out of data science/ML type bootcamps that think everything they write needs to use Pandas or NumPy, even when they’re just trying to manipulate a CSV file. Or the ones who come out of automation boot camps, but can’t research how to solve more general problems that aren’t driving Selenium. I understand that the automation boot camp may not have taught you how to make direct HTTP requests and check payloads, but I do expect you to be able to describe back to me the problem, how you might decompose it, what you’re going to have to research, etc.
In my opinion, folks should focus on learning how to be engineers/problem solvers, recognizing that the technologies used are really just tools that can be applied in a plethora of ways.
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On YouTube I found a 12+ hour coding bootcamp by Ania Kubów.
It contains about 8 hours of JavaScript coding.
In the comment there are links to the specific sections of 12 hour.
I had a brief look and according to me it is worthwhile.
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