Things I learned from Eliot

It was certainly a pleasant surprise to hear from Eliot in the last class period. To be honest, I didn't know exactly what to think of him at first: between his pedantic attire and him "giving us permission" to be creative, I really wasn't expecting much from him. Fortunately, things changed as he began to talk more and settle more into himself. I learned some valuable things from his story at PayPal: first, that I must think outside of our limits to overcome obstacles, and second, to plan ahead when I code. When Eliot described the shame the team had about having so many dependencies on the front-end to the back-end I knew exactly what he was talking about. In the story, there is a valuable lesson all programmers can learn: that we must aim to create versatile code to avoid having to rewrite large and critical sections of code. This in turn takes careful planning to avoid creating dependencies. I liked how both ideas link to each other when creativity was an essential part to finding a solution to the problem.