An embarrassing epiphany

[kestrell]

I spent 2020 updating my computer skills--I'm currently on my sixth and seventh online course, and I took about a dozen webinars--and I've been mostly receptive to new apps and new ways of doing things.

But I have this one, er, blind spot.

Whenever the first set of instructions is to go to the Windows search or Jaws search, I resist.

I cut my teeth on Windows '95 (which was really just DOS with a thin veneer of a GUI over it) and Unix, and there is still this idea in the back of my mind that old school users have a zillion keyboard commands memorized and don't need no stinkin' search.

Then a few seconds ago, it hit me.

I am *that guy*.

I am that guy who would rather waste an hour or two, wandering around lost, thinking, "No, wait, this is beginning to look familiar...," rather than pull over and ask for directions on how to get there.

F***,

Comments

Insight for the win!

[jesse_the_k]

Congrats on a useful realization!

I'm really happy that search is so ubiquitous now because there's no chance I'd remember the location, for example, of "accept Touch ID for App Store payments" among the more than 1500 iOS settings. Apple kindly presents search as the first choice in the settings list. In addition to the command-line driven Spotlight system wide search in Macs, there's a nifty free utility called EasyFind which offers the scores of search limiters as menu options. https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware

I bet someone has made a similarly wonderful tool for Windows.

Re: Insight for the win!

[kestrell]

Right. Part of my recent revelation was that both Windows and Jaws are so complex, even expert users need the search app to locate things like that one setting about thousands of settings, and that is just the Windows settings.

[dewline]

I have such moments of realization, too. You are not alone in this.

[melita66]

OMG, my older colleagues. It's weird. One is 6 years older than me, but has never been into home computer / non-work computer stuff so has no idea about what's available. The other's actually what I call a programmer's programmer and is really knowledgeable, has kids who are in their 20s so has kept up on some more recent stuff, worked for a gaming company for a while, and is over 70. But yeah, will mess around for ages before doing an online search or look at the app help.

them: "blah-blah-blah, can't get some visual studio thing to work."
Me: (rolls eyes) Have you googled or searched stackoverflow yet?

[kestrell]

One of the many subjects that fascinate me is how we learn, and a lot of it comes down to learning how to learn easier: focus better for shorter periods and, if you're really stumped, walk away and do something else for a while. All these concepts about cognitive load and metacognition keep coming back to learning should not involve so much suffering and frustration. And, of course, these concepts come up again and again in UX.

Speaking of UX, I take it this is the editor you are using with Python? I'm still at the simple text editor phase, using Notepad in Windows, but I need to choose a programming edotor soon, but it's as if ecery person who teaches Python has a different favorite editor.

[melita66]

No idea about which programming editor to use with Python. This seems to be a thing with some open source projects. Don't like how a project works? Either create a new branch or copy the repo and do your own thing!

I work for a GIS (geographic information systems) software company. My team works on one of the low-level libraries so we're programming in C and Java. It's possible to build the C library using Visual Studio. VS is a monster of a program and and will often change options, file formats, so we have to figure out what's changed sometimes. The software that incorporates our library also uses Visual Studio so we have to use the same, mostly.

Our company is relatively open for people to use different solutions, software packages, etc. It can get messy when someone like me who deals with several different teams who are all using different messaging packages.

To illustrate with what was, admittedly, an unusual situation...

Our big user conference is in July. We went to remote work in March. IIRC, that's about when they announced that the July conference would go virtual so everyone's scrambling. It was decided that most presentations would be pre-recorded and available on-demand. By the time this was settled, people had a few weeks to record them so that the hosting company could do some post-processing like captioning. Many recordings have two presenters, including the one I was involved in. So they announce that everyone should use recording software X. "But why can't we use Y?" "or Z?" was the immediate response by some people. The first response was that Y and Z had shown some issues during testings. Within a few days, Y and Z were retested and put on the approved list. Meanwhile I'm like, "Just tell them no and settle on something!"

I found it very nerve-wracking even though I wasn't involved in the decision-making and my co-presenter and I got our stuff recorded without any problems. I think it was just the uncertainty of it in this year of uncertainty.

[melita66]

Hah! I didn't quite answer your question. I do light programming in C and Java and use Visual Studio for the C. Colleagues use Eclipse and something else for programming in Java.

I don't program anything that affects the programs that make up the library. My part is essentially adding data into the library (coordinate system and transformation definitions) so I use notepad to set up the files. Visual Studio's color coding, indentation help, etc wouldn't help me for this. I do use Visual Studio when I'm writing tests because then the cues are helpful.