theycallhimtom
In circling you just talk about how you're feeling in the moment. So a newcomer might share that they're anxious. Someone might ask them how that feels physically in their body (butterflies in the stomach etc). Someone else might share their reaction (I'm feeling protective of the new person).
So what do I get out of it? When people share their feelings I generally feel a lot of empathy for them. It's also interesting when people have different reactions to what's going on in the circle. They share those reactions much more openly than people normally would.
I leave feeling like I understand the other people at some deep level. But I don't know where they work, what their hobbies are, if they're in a relationship, etc. I trust that in circling I can be vulnerable with them and they won't hurt me. But I haven't built up trust with them in other areas (loaning money, etc.).
Compare that to meeting a stranger (we both read the same blog) for a beer. I know his hobbies, his career aspirations, what he thinks about politics, etc. The feeling of connection is very different compared to someone I met circling.
"Anyone who is still a programmer in their 40s has to have developed some good communication skills." "Old programmers are dabblers." "Old programmers have judgement." "We can pick up any new language because we’ve used so many over the years."
I've met old programmers who are counter examples to all these points.
A steelmanned version of the article would argue why older coders are more likely to have these skills than young coders. It also needs to talk about the average difference in ability relative to the variance in each group. If old coders are on average 0.1 standard deviations better than young coders you should focus on hiring the good old or young coders. If old coders are on average 1.5 standard deviations better than young coders you should just focus on hiring the good old coders and exceptional young coders.
You are given about 10 lines of code and need to change one line to make it correct. The problems are things like binary search, topological sort, shortest paths, etc.
If it is an introductory class just be happy that people are there. I know plenty of programmers (including myself) who only got interested in CS because of video games. I then figured out I liked CS and didn't really like making games.
The main difference is that I have spent a lot of time working on writing code quickly and correctly. Every time I competed in TC I would read the code of the best people and try to figure out why their code was so much simpler than mine. Now I think I can write clean code faster than most.
The downside is that I have spent a ton of time working on 50-200 line projects. Throw me into a 500k line code base and I'm no longer world class.
Getting to where I am is mostly a product of spending a ton of time in college practicing for programming contests. In college I saw a very strong correlation between time spent programming outside of class and programming skill.
You want the probability that B2 happens given that B happened right? (prob(B2) / prob(B) not prob(B2) / prob (A or B))
Thanks