The one thing that I strongly remember about my secondary school experience in Nigeria is the coding competitions. For some reason as I transitioned from junior to senior secondary school, we were going for one every week. It felt like just about every NGO was organizing some sort of initiative to encourage “technical enlightenment” in the community.
The common thread binding my experience was that: at the start, almost like in exams, there was some paper containing programming tasks to be solved. These were then handed out to groups (usually the school teams that came) or individual competitors to be solved. The time control was often over 3 hours! There would sometimes be some precocious groups that finished well before time, but more often than not, everyone almost always found themselves scrambling to complete everything at the end.
A lot of it was hard, at least initially. I can’t count how many times my teammates and I would receive the questions and look at each other frantically, realising that there were not a lot of questions we felt confident about on the problem sheet. Yet what’s funny thinking about it now is that we always found a way to get most of the work done. My team made several podium finishes, and on about two occasions, we went all the way. I've spent my day trying to conceptualise what would often change during the events and figure out why the whole team could sometimes go from being initially bamboozled by questions to solving them completely.
I've only now settled on belief as the explanation as to why that was. Initially, when I told myself this today, I quickly rebuffed the idea. I think I just felt very early on that it felt too trite to suggest that the only separating factor between my initial states of panic/confusion and then my states of understanding was belief, but this evening, against my better attempts to dispel the notion, I’ve found some reason to justify it.
Apart from the time I’m writing code in a day, sometimes I also find myself doing something technical. “The modem isn’t working”, “My mum’s email client isn’t receiving emails”, or “She’s having some difficulty formatting her Word document in a certain way”. Sometimes the tasks are very open-ended too, and I often don’t even know the answer at first go. Outside switching it on and off, I can’t always initially tell you why the modem isn’t working. I’m also no better at MS Word than the average user and if I’m not clicking the send button on mail clients, there’s not a lot I know about them. Yet time and time again, I find it. I somehow click something or stumble across something and then the problem goes away. In those areas, I don’t think my technical ability far surpasses my mother’s. It just feels like I’ve come to back myself to figure things out, even when the beginning is initially confusing. In these areas, I suppose what sometimes separates my mum and me is that my head subconsciously believes that the issue at hand has a remedy, and just knowing that there’s a solution somewhere pushes me to find it.
I believe the hack is just about getting comfortable with the initial blur and being energised relentlessly by the understanding that the solution is somewhere under your nose, though momentarily obscure.
The one thing that I strongly remember about my secondary school experience in Nigeria is the coding competitions. For some reason as I transitioned from junior to senior secondary school, we were going for one every week. It felt like just about every NGO was organizing some sort of initiative to encourage “technical enlightenment” in the community.
The common thread binding my experience was that: at the start, almost like in exams, there was some paper containing programming tasks to be solved. These were then handed out to groups (usually the school teams that came) or individual competitors to be solved. The time control was often over 3 hours! There would sometimes be some precocious groups that finished well before time, but more often than not, everyone almost always found themselves scrambling to complete everything at the end.
A lot of it was hard, at least initially. I can’t count how many times my teammates and I would receive the questions and look at each other frantically, realising that there were not a lot of questions we felt confident about on the problem sheet. Yet what’s funny thinking about it now is that we always found a way to get most of the work done. My team made several podium finishes, and on about two occasions, we went all the way. I've spent my day trying to conceptualise what would often change during the events and figure out why the whole team could sometimes go from being initially bamboozled by questions to solving them completely.
I've only now settled on belief as the explanation as to why that was. Initially, when I told myself this today, I quickly rebuffed the idea. I think I just felt very early on that it felt too trite to suggest that the only separating factor between my initial states of panic/confusion and then my states of understanding was belief, but this evening, against my better attempts to dispel the notion, I’ve found some reason to justify it.
Apart from the time I’m writing code in a day, sometimes I also find myself doing something technical. “The modem isn’t working”, “My mum’s email client isn’t receiving emails”, or “She’s having some difficulty formatting her Word document in a certain way”. Sometimes the tasks are very open-ended too, and I often don’t even know the answer at first go. Outside switching it on and off, I can’t always initially tell you why the modem isn’t working. I’m also no better at MS Word than the average user and if I’m not clicking the send button on mail clients, there’s not a lot I know about them. Yet time and time again, I find it. I somehow click something or stumble across something and then the problem goes away. In those areas, I don’t think my technical ability far surpasses my mother’s. It just feels like I’ve come to back myself to figure things out, even when the beginning is initially confusing. In these areas, I suppose what sometimes separates my mum and me is that my head subconsciously believes that the issue at hand has a remedy, and just knowing that there’s a solution somewhere pushes me to find it.
I believe the hack is just about getting comfortable with the initial blur and being energised relentlessly by the understanding that the solution is somewhere under your nose, though momentarily obscure.