The readings provided a great background that will be helpful moving forward in the semester. The Pragmatic Programmer Quick Reference Guide in particular will prove to be an extremely useful guide, and I imagine it will last as a permanent reference for me in general. The video explaining how the Internet works is also helpful because I believe it is important to understand how something actually works when you’re using it. Using the same logic, the computing timeline helps explain how we’ve gotten to the current state of computing and where it has the potential to head. It’s fascinating to see how long ago its roots can be mapped out to, and even more interesting to try and predict what could happen in 10, 20, 50 or 100 years.

What I took away the most from the reading was learning how to think like a programmer. Computational thinking being transferred into a different realm has the ability to help in a career that is not primarily programming. It would not be easy to simply redesign the way that we think in a snap of time, but it’s something I want to keep in mind moving forward and work towards being able to do. While I don’t work in journalism — I work in public relations — the same theory that programming and journalism can be partners can also be applied to my field as well. Public Relations has become married to the digital world just in the same way that journalism has. It’s not as simple as performing a traditional campaign with press releases or a written speech. You need a digital campaign as well. Conversations happen about an organization online, and it’s important to be able to not only participate in these conversations about a client, but to understand the back-end of these forums, as well as to also be able to think in a different mindset. Learning how to think in a computing mindset will help me in my daily work.