Maaike Brinkhof's blog

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Visual Thinking learning journey, Day 2 - Play

Visual Thinking learning journey, Day 2 - Play

Yesterday, I devoted almost the entire working day and beyond to get my learning journey started. Today, I didn't have this luxury. I had a lot of to-dos for my IT job, but I managed to sneak some practice in. Because I had so little time, I decided

Visual Thinking learning journey, day 1 - Overwhelm

Visual Thinking learning journey, day 1 - Overwhelm

Date: 20 October 2025. Last updated: 18:00. This day is still in progress, so this post will be updated. The Why I saw the (free!) Sketch Your Mind online conference, and the intro talk alone convinced me to give this a try. "This" being: marrying textual thinking

Learning to Code: What did I learn from failing?

Failing is not fun, and it’s especially terrible if you’re a perfectionist like me. Every failure feels like a stab to the heart, and I take it personally. Trying to rewire my thinking around this is quite hard, but also rewarding. Failing isn’t fun, but at least

The Struggle with Myself: Learning to Code For the Seventh Time

I have tried to learn how to code many times and each time I have failed. I say failed because every time I’ve quit without having a good grasp of coding and it didn’t carry over into my work as tester. I felt as clueless and intimidated by