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...

I had originally planned to read a book about form usability this month, but one of my goals for the year was to try out usability testing. Last month's book, Steve Krug's  Don't Make Me Think , convinced me to try, and we needed to go live this month with some Very Important, Highly Visible features on our internal portal that everyone in the entire department needs to use. Don't Make Me Think 's promises of immediate, valuable feedback on usability problems from doing usability testing convinced me that NOW was the time, hence the switch to Steve Krug's other book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy , which focuses on doing informal, cheap, and easy usability testing, and suggests what to try first when trying to fix the issues that are inevitably discovered during testing. It was an easy, fast read, so I was able to finish the book in time to use its advice to guide our very first usability tests AND fix most of the issues we discovered during testing before goin...

A giant banana car is in town , and it came to visit us at NMDA! Some of my co-workers saw the car at a local fastfood joint and asked the driver to come on by. And he did! The whole department, from the Secretary of Agriculture himself on down, filed out to see the sights and chat with the driver and creator, Steve Braithwaite. The car was created out of a truck, he told us. He travels all over the US in this amazing vehicle. You can read more about it on his website , Facebook , or Twitter .

So on Sunday I finished sprint 5. It went fairly well, although I didn't have as much time as I like, despite it being a 3 week long sprint. I was out of town for 4 days, plus there was that whole Thanksgiving thing, so it came out to be more like 2 weeks after all. Considering the amount of time I had, I think it went ok. There were a few oddities and bumps in the road. First, I was highly annoyed when I discovered that in JDBC the table name/alias isn't included in ResultSet column names . Instead, you have to alias the actual column if you need to distinguish between column names in the result. Grr. Second, I discovered that it's really kind of a pain to call static methods using JSTL .  Since I use static methods in virtually every JSP to format the output for HTML/links/etc. to ensure user input doesn't do whacky things, this is a problem. For now I'm putting off rewriting the JSPs to use JSTL, because I'll have to write custom EL functions and maybe tw...

This was so unusual and exciting in a programmer-geek sort of way that I felt driven to blog about it. Today, for the first time in decade as a software engineer, I have actually used recursion in my work. It was in a Ruby on Rails model, to find all the descendants and parents of an object (there are no cycles in these relationships, so this works). And it was awesome. That's all. Just had to share that. ;)