Shambling Towards Perfection

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...

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...

This sprint went remarkably well. Being a hermit all weekend helped me to get as much done as I wanted to (and is probably the only way I could have gotten as much done as I wanted to in earlier sprints, but that really, really doesn’t work as a long-term thing unless one wishes to leave sanity behind). There was one item I started on and then realized I needed clarification from my advisor before I could complete it, but I got everything else done. I also didn’t do quite as much studying as I had intended; honestly I really, really don’t want to have to do this wretched studying, so I procrastinated. Anyway here are the items I did get done: Create outline for presentation. Gather study materials for oral exam. Fix task creation error where error message is sometimes shown though the task was created. Fix blocking tasks page. Fix task editing bug where the task creator can’t edit the title/desc. Study for the oral exam. (sort of, as discussed above) Move the task list on the...

The meeting yesterday with my professor went fine. It was quite brief, as there wasn’t much to discuss. I let him know that I had committed code to the SVN repository on Sunday, and that I had fixed all the bugs I know of and then started on UI improvements. I had a few questions on stuff I worked on during the sprint, which had all been from comments he’d made earlier, so I got clarifications on those items. He will pull my code on Wednesday and get it deployed on his server, so that’s pretty much the deadline for being done with stuff I want to actually be in the demo on Friday. On Saturday I sent my advisor an outline of the slideshow presentation I’ll have to give, and he did say that was fine. The other thing we got done during the meeting yesterday was making sure my laptop will work in the room where I’ll be presenting. One of my friends advised me to do that, and then I remembered that I’d had massive issues in that very room with my old netbook. I believe it was completely...

During this next sprint, after figuring out the basic outline of my presentation, the main thing that must get done is fixing bugs. I’m going to do a quick demo of my software during the final exam, and so stuff needs to WORK. So those are the highest priority items. Anyway, here are the sprint backlog items: Priority Description Points 700 Create outline for presentation. 2 690 Gather study materials for oral exam. 1 680 Fix task creation error where error message is sometimes shown though the task was created. 3 670 Fix blocking tasks page. 3 660 Fix task editing bug where the task creator can’t edit the title/desc. 3 650 Study for the oral exam. 3 640 Move the task list on the project page to the top, above the project info. .5 630 Make subtasks indented on the task page. .5 620 Make the subtask and dependent task lists further apart on the task page. .5 610 Put a link on the task page going back to the project page. .5 600 Make the default task priority “normal”. 1 ...