What’s the one thing I bring to this career (and a potential employer) that nobody else can?
My exerience in the health care field sets me apart from other employees. Working as a dental hygienist seems completely unrelated to software development but the soft skills that translate to other fields are relevant and useful. During my time as a hygienist, I developed strong skills in communication, attention to detail, problem solving, and patience to name a few. Working with people in such a vulnerable and challenging setting makes my people skills and professional skills unique assets.
What are 3 things I’ll start doing to “un-stick” myself whenever I get stuck on tough piece of code, logic, or feature?
Break the problem down into smaller solvable problems, then connecting the dots along the way
Read it twice, solve it manually with 3 sets of sample data, optimize the manual steps, write the manual steps as comments or pseudo-code, replace the comments or pseudo-code with real code, optimize the real code (SOURCE: Solving Problems article, link above)
Take breaks and ASK FOR HELP
Things I want to know more about
Implementing the 5 whys problem within a software development team. Other websites for code challenges that I can use for interview prep.