Day 37: A Day of Realizations and Accomplishments

        Today felt like a big victory for so many reasons. This entire project I did not have a chance to work with anyone as a pair programmer because I was focused on my personal research and I provided overall support to the other pair programmers. At the beginning of the Summer Institute, I worked with Sandesh and Imma, however, it did not feel like a pair-programming experience, because we were all learning about the scope of the project. It was a rookie boot camp, and we were all in it together. For the last three days, however, I was working with Roberto and Sama, and though it was 3 of us, it felt like a Pair Programming experience. We were creating the teamwork on Web Scraping, Mapping, and Pivot Tables. Yesterday was Roberto's last day, so Sama and I became a true pair-programming team.
        I realized that I feel especially good when working with other people. I  experience a sense of responsibility and accountability that is hard to achieve when self-starting and self-organizing. Though we had blockers today, I did not feel frustrated because I could immediately discuss them with Sama. Together, we bounced ideas off of each other until we found an optimal solution. Sama is a great student and a professional - she challenges me to produce better material. When working alone, I noticed, I would become irritated by challenges. Contrary, I feel empowered by these challenges when working with someone. For example, today, I spent about 2 hours developing a Python script for populating an HTML table with data needed for proper geo visualizations. In the beginning, this idea felt like a major challenge. However, after discussing it with Sama and Dr. Jan, I was very excited to get to the solution. We worked so well we completely finished all of the bug fixes and write up for the Chapter 6 teamwork.
        This is one of the most important realizations I have had during this internship. I look back at my life and realize that I have been the most self-conscious about my productivity when working alone. I create very high expectations of myself and then feel challenged by them. I need a group of people, or even better, a person to work with in order to feel at peace with my productivity levels.

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