Peer Learning Days are days mapped out in the week to ensure ALX students are growing in technical, professional and soft skills. It's not about sharing solutions but empowering peers to solve problems.

Peer Learning Day's actionable steps include:

• Define objective: define the objectives of a project to be executed during the peer learning session

• Clarify Action Items: clarify how time would be spent on actionable times.

• White-boarding: this is the art of brainstorming using a whiteboard. Steps to be taken are illustrated on a whiteboard.

• Pair programming: is an industry technique deployed after the solution becomes clearer. Involves peers coding the solutions they’ve generated from brainstorming on a whiteboard.

• Share Group Process: at the beginning of the peer learning session, objective and actionable items are shared along the line progress made is also shared. This encourages accountability and easy accessibility by other groups.

Technical Questioning: Two essential skills are to be known when asking technical questions:

• Ability to find answers to your questions:

  As a software engineer, it’s important to acquire the skill of finding solutions from manual pages and documentation.

• Ability to ask good technical questions:

  Asking questions the right way is a skill, when mastered it guarantees an effective response.

How to Ask Good Technical Questions

• Assign a Title to your question.

• Avoid screenshots.

• If it involves code write the code sample by formatting, linting and documentation.

• Do a grammar check on your questions.

• Track your questions for a response and if answered indicate.

• Be humble.

Benefits of Answering Technical Questions

• Helps you learn how to ask questions.

• Helps you gain a better understanding of the program or subject matter.

• We also learn by answering questions.

Thinking

Is the process of reasoning a subject matter. There are two types namely; Diffused and Focused thinking.

Focused Thinking:

Involves putting mental effort to solve a problem. Here the brain is highly attentive, it’s at its best concentration abilities.

Diffuse thinking:

Looking at the big picture of diffuse thinking, the brain is allowed to wander to connect dots. Minimal mental power is utilized. Our creativity and problem-solving skills are unlocked when we think diffusely.

It’s best to utilize both types of thinking to generate effective solutions to problems.