Shambling Towards Perfection

Saturday was the last day for wet clay. I couldn't really do anything new on the wheel, mainly because it wouldn't dry fast enough to trim or to be ready to be bisqued in time for this coming Saturday, which will be Glaze Day. I did manage to trim my final cylinder-thing without destroying it, so yay. I completely forgot to take a photo though, because Saturday was really quite hectic. We did a raku firing, which ate up a lot of time; first I had to paint my dragon with raku glazes, like so: I always think it's neat to see what the glazes look like first. Some of the newbies kept thinking the final color would look like the color when it's not yet fired, and that's definitely not always the case. I put white crackle on the shell (though alas, it didn't really crackle), alligator rust on the main body, glass red on the spines, black on the eyes, and a new glaze on the wings. It was technically a regular low-fire glaze, I believe, but our teacher speculated ...

Last night I started dismantling my Wall o' Stickies representing my product backlog and finished items,  and before I did so I figured I'd take some photos to commemorate all the hard work documented on my walls. Here's the final state of the backlog and finished item areas: As you can see I started to run out of room in the finished section there at the end. And here the finished items are, nicely stacked into piles for each sprint: The backlog contains a lot of items that were OBE (overcome by events) by being rewritten and implemented in a slightly different way, plus some ponies and things that turned out to be too big or not necessary after all. I'll have to go back through these later this summer and get rid of the OBE items and rewrite the rest. Some of them I would still like to implement, so I'll probably do a sprint or two and knock out a few items. Plus there were a few bugs that turned up at the end, so I do need to fix those. So there are...

I consider the "final exam" containing my presentation and demo of the project plus an oral exam on coursework to be the final sprint review. The committee judging the final exam consisted of my advisor plus another professor from my department (my database professor) and a professor from another department (Accounting and Information Systems; I've been perusing classes in other departments trying to decide what to take next and discovered that she teaches a lot of database-related stuff in BCIS). The review/exam went well in that I did, in fact, pass. The project presentation and demo could hardly have gone better. I was able to answer questions intelligently and explained all the features, pros, cons, etc. of the project with no problem. Two of my friends who also work in the industry attended (the presentation/demo portion is open to the public) and so I answered questions from 5 people who knew lots about the domain in which I worked. I consider that quite an accom...

So I figured I should do some final(ish?) updates on the project and finish off the sprint data and so forth. So here's the sprint 11 retrospective. It went swimmingly and I finished everything by the time it needed to be finished. Many things took even less time than I thought they would, so I didn't actually end up having to stay up all of Tuesday night to finish the programming issues before Wednesday morning. The tasks I finished were: Mark subtasks on the project page.  (15 minutes) "Task created" page should return to the project page. (15 minutes) Add a link to the login page/project page (depending on whether or not the user is logged in) to the error page. (10 minutes) Turn the subtask radio buttons on the task/new task pages into a drop down list. (.5 hour) Change the dependency checkboxes on the task/new task pages into a drop down and a button to add more drop downs as needed. (1 hour) (Actually changed to 3 checkboxes for now) Make the comment te...

The first priority is getting as much programming done as I can before Wednesday morning. After that, it’s all about getting the presentation done and brushing up on past coursework. So those are the sprint goals. So the sprint backlog items are: Priority Description Points 800 Mark subtasks on the project page. .5 790 ”Task created” page should return to the project page. .5 780 Add a link to the login page/project page (depending on whether or not the user is logged in) to the error page. .5 770 Turn the subtask radio buttons on the task/new task pages into a drop down list. 2 760 Change the dependency checkboxes on the task/new task pages into a drop down and a button to add more drop downs as needed. 2 750 Make the comment text box count down how many characters remain as the user types. 2 740 Add a javascript calendar picker for date fields. 3 730 Make the task list on the project page a sortable table. 3 720 Create slides for the presentation. 3 710 Study for the or...