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About Me

A photo of Mary Frey

Hello, I'm Mary Frey. After finishing my BA in History and spending a year abroad living in Ireland completing an MA in Archaeology, I realized that academic fields do not offer much opportunity to enter the field, let alone opportunity for growth. Thus, I endeavored to teach, only to realize that I needed to be teaching adults or not at all.

As such, I looked at my skills and passions and realized that the technology field would be a good fit for me. Plenty of opportunity to challenge myself, learn new things, and grow as an individual and eventual employee.

So, at the recommendation of a friend, I turned my sights to the Full-Stack Development Career Change Track at Centriq. The rest - as they say- is history.

How my hobbies help me be a better developer

If someone told me, when I first started learning to code, that being able to read crochet and knitting patterns would help me read code, I would have thought they were crazy. However, the more I learn, the more I realize that just as I've come to know the intricacies of patterns - their distint abbreviations - what causes a repeat - what signals the end, that each coding language is much the same - just another set of directions that a computer(or I) follows. Mistakes in patterns leads to mistakes in a finished product! So do errors in code!

So now when I get an error message, I think back to the troubleshooting method I've used for years:

  1. What type of error message it?
    • Is it a spelling (syntax) error?
      • Did the author put sc when they meant dc?
      • Did the developer forget to add the 'm' when assigning a value to a decimal?
    • Is it a logic error?
      • Did the author put the incorrect number of stitches as the condition for ending a repeat?
      • Did the developer use the wrong <> as the condition on their loop?
  2. Now that I've found the error, how do I fix it?
    • Is it a simple error? A missing {}? A dropped stitch?
      • Great! Fix it!
    • Is it a more complex error? The mistake doesn't jump right out a me?
      • Break the problem into smaller pieces: Where does the problem start? end?
      • Make a plan to solve the problem
      • Get to work!
  3. Repeat as needed

So it might be a stretch to say that becoming a better knitter makes me a better developer, but to be able to see similarities between them and draw on now instictual knowledge that I never could have imagined would be helpful in this field, is such an amazing experience!