Shambling Towards Perfection

Well, my  2020 goals  didn't all get done, but then when I came up with them I wasn't anticipating a global health emergency to derail... Everything... So with the start of the New Year I figured I should revisit last year's goals and set new goals for this year. Image by Ockert Le Roux from Pixabay 2020 goals Finish rewriting apps at work. Try doing actual usability testing on at least 2 apps in order to determine if it's worth our while for future development. Complete UX/design training curriculum at work. Read at least one professional development type book per month. Finish 2 major e-textiles/wearable electronics projects by the end of the year. Finish up the nativity figurines I made in pottery class before Christmas. Finish 3 mixed media 3D printed/acrylic paintings by the end of the year. Things I'm already doing but want to keep doing include: Kick ass at work. (No false modesty here) Practice Spanish at least 6 days a week. Mentor CS students and women tr...

I started this book waaaay back in the good ol' days, BC. Before Coronavirus. And then the pandemic struck and blew up my placid dev existence. On Friday, March 13, 2020 at 4pm NMSU finally decided to allow us those of us who wanted or needed to, to work from home. I took the weekend plus 2 days to get my home office set up; I had a feeling this was going to go on longer than any of us thought at the time. That decision has paid off in spades as I was able to get a pretty sweet dedicated workspace set up, with a corner desk, my 2 personal monitors, my work monitor, my work tower, a printer/storage cabinet, and a new laser printer. Oh, and a nice office chair and one of those carpet protectors. Current me is very grateful to past me for having that forethought...  Anyway, I officially started working from home March 18. By that time NMSU was no longer "allowing" us to work from home by choice, but instead sending everyone possible home. In less than a week we had to move n...

One of my goals for this year is to read a book per month that's related to my work. I've already finished the book for January, mainly because I had started it last year, but hey, it counts! Anyhow, the book is Don't Make Me Think  by Steve Krug . While it is a little dated with respect to mobile UX at this point (this 3rd edition was published in 2014), it was a very useful read with lots of specific, actionable advice. So much so that I had to give up on trying to bookmark every useful thing and just created a long list of ideas and items to discuss with my fellow devs instead. I highly recommend this book if you, like me, are a dev who is responsible for user interfaces without having (almost) any formal training on UI or UX. In other words, most devs from a traditional CS background... Argh. But anyhow, it really is a great resource for simple, specific ways to improve your user interfaces. We're definitely going to redesign our navigation based on the great...

Just for fun, and because I don't have a whole lot to report right now, here's my current home office set-up. These photos were taken after I'd gotten most of the product backlog completed, but before I started on any sprints. Whiteboard (made from shower board from Home Depot), bookcase containing all my computer science and math books, electric kettle for a steady supply of caffeine, and computer tower. Monitors, printer/scanner, plasma ball, headset, speakers, printer, and desk. Corkboard, small magnetic whiteboard, and plastic drawers for computer parts. Product backlog, sprint backlog, burndown chart, sprint progress board. Microwave, fridge, footlocker for non-perishable snacks and tea, and a second shower board whiteboard. Large calendar with which to plan sprints. So if the zombie apocalypse comes, I'll be able to survive for some time in my home office, and keep coding all the while. Nothing, dead or undead, shall keep me from fini...

I've been researching what's required to make my application less vulnerable to things like SQL injection or other malicious attacks. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I've apparently already done the two biggest things, which are using PreparedStatements and escaping special characters . I've googled quite a bit and these are the main things I've found so far. According to the latter article I do need to do a few more small things, such as specifying the character encoding in my headers, but that seems to be about it... I'll be double-checking all my SQL to make sure there are no inappropriate uses of Statements, but apparently this issue is going to be a lot faster and easier than I expected. Rather shocking, really... Hopefully google hasn't lead me astray. In other news I'm leaning towards revising the issue "Add error checking, unit testing, and integration testing using JUnit, DBUnit, FindBugs, etc." to just focusing on Find...

I met with my adviser for the first time last Wednesday, and we decided our next meeting would be September 24 and then we'll meet every two weeks thereafter. Since the 24th would fall in the middle of a sprint I decided to extend the first one to end this Saturday, the 29th (I was also under the weather several days last week, so it was a good move all around). On the 30th I'll upload all my code to the version control system my prof has set up (svn) and configure everything so that it will run on the department servers. I'll be demoing my latest work at every meeting, so every other Sunday will be configuration day. I realize continuous builds on the department machines would be better but it's not exactly practical, so I'm settling for continuous builds on my home machine. Since my last post I have successfully configured Tomcat to use SSL and jbcrypt . The latter involved writing a custom realm but turned out to be quite trivial; I simply extended JDBCRealm ...