Shambling Towards Perfection

Lately I've seen a lot of new/aspiring developers talk about difficulties learning git . I was confused at first, because there are approximately a zillion git tutorials out there. But then I started really looking at what people were saying AND what all those tutorials contain. The problem is most tutorials start out with "here are a ton of git commands to memorize", and this is not where people are having problems. People are having problems with "what is git, why should I learn it, and what does it look like to use it in a real-life project?", and those questions are largely not answered in all those millions of tutorials. So at the risk of redundancy, I'm going to attempt to address these questions in Yet Another Article About Git. First, I want to make it clear that if you want to be a programmer, any kind of programmer, you need to know git. You just DO. This is the short version of the answer to "why should I learn it?".  The medium length a...

So sprint 7 was finally finished last night. I ended up hardly being able to work on the project at all during what was supposed to be the sprint (December 10-24), so this was mostly done during the last week. Being off of work has, unsurprisingly, really helped increase the amount I can get done. So I'll do another sprint for the next week or so, and then in the middle or end of next week I'll work with my professor to get the project set up on his machine and usable for the spring semester. This means I'll need to get all database schema changes done ASAP. That'll be my first focus for the next sprint. During the sprint I finished all of the sprint backlog items. Those are: Set up git repository (1 hour), Rewrite edit user/task/project code (3 hours), Change email code as per discussion (2), Rewrite unfinished tasks page (3), Rewrite most recent tasks page (3), Rewrite blocking tasks page (3), Fix login error when user doesn't exist (1). I pretty quickly gave ...

The goal for sprint 7 is to create a git repo and finish the rewrite of the application, for reals this time. Including some of the items left over from last sprint, the sprint backlog items are: Priority Description Points 600 Set up git repository 2 590 Rewrite edit user/task/project code 4 580 Change email code as per discussion 3 570 Rewrite unfinished tasks page 3 560 Rewrite most recent tasks page 3 550 Rewrite blocking tasks page 3 500 Fix login error when user doesn't exist 2 This is a total of 20 hours, which, considering the time of year, seems more reasonable than 30ish. I'll also be doing some research on how to improve the task dependency/subtask relationships. Ideally I want to be able to display trees of these relationships (akin to comment trees on some websites), and this may require some database schema changes, all of which I want to get done in sprint 8 (before going live, basically). And that's it.

Yet again my biggest problem during this sprint was finding time to work on it. Considering the time of year, this isn't really a surprise. All the same, I had hoped to have more time than I did. During sprint 7 I'm going to try as hard as I can to work on the project at least a little every day. I've got a lot of stuff to do before next semester, so I want to get to doing it! I also thought of a number of things I had overlooked and discovered a few odd bugs, so the product backlog grew a bit during this sprint. I finished rewriting the new file link page (3 hours), the new user page (1 hour), the new task page (2 hours), new comment page (1 hour), the task page (3 hours), and I fixed the bug with navigating to the projects page (15 minutes). Some things took a good deal longer than estimated... There were no big issues during my development time, however I realized I had completely neglected to include time for making editing of tasks and projects work. Basically I wa...