I need to pay more attention to detail.

When I received feedback about my work throughout the course, one of the most common comments was “pay attention to the instructions carefully”. Part of it is changing my area of focus after working for a few years. My previous career was in fashion, and the kind of details I had to pay attention to were different in some ways. Those detail were mostly visual, like: how straight is the hem? Are the buttons sewn exactly the same distance from each other? Or do the fabric patterns match up perfectly? After working in the industry, those details have became second nature. When I walk into a room, the evenness of pant hems and the straightness of seams are details I instantly notice.

However, throughout this course I’ve rediscovered the need to pay close attention to written details. It’s a skill that will be important in my future career. I’m pursuing a second degree in Computer Science and hope to become a software engineer in the near future. A large part of programming is writing code. And the code we write is case sensitive, which means the computer does not consider “camel” and “Camel” the same thing. This is because one has a capitalized “c”, and the other has a lower case “c”. So a small detail like that can break an entire system.

The frequent reminders in this course of “paying attention to the instructions carefully” has been a good wake up call. It has made me more conscious while reading and writing, and hopefully will help me be a better computer programmer in the future.