Weeknotes 22

I took part in a whiteboarding session! But not at my house, at a co-working space, and I didn’t do any of the drawing, so I’m not quite there yet. However, it was really successful in helping a colleague and I with a problem we were previously a bit stuck on.

I’ve been working remotely for around 7 years now, and I believe that most of my work can be done fine from home, but I have to admit that it’s hard to replicate these sort of in-person workshop-type sessions.

A lot of this week has been spent writing specifications and planning. I found it quite hard to take all my notes and turn them into something that someone else could make sense of. In fact, I still haven’t fully managed that, but I have got some fairly decent cards written for Jira.

During the planning I did 👆 I came up with a potential solution to a problem that we will need to solve. There are often so many ways to solve something that I find it extremely difficult to decide what to do. I think sometimes you just have to pick what you think the correct solution is and go for it. You can always change course later.

Josef Strzibny proving once again that dates and times are hard in Summer and winter time changes with DateTime. Elixir has a nice way of handling DST changes though, as you’d expect 😉.

“This project will only take 2 hours”

A very well articulated example of why software is hard.

The students then discussed how they would implement the idea and asked a few clarification questions, before one stated:

“This project will only take 2 hours.”

After seeing the look on my face, another student said, “I think it would be more like 4 hours. I’ve never used the clipboard system call before.”

Incidentally, I love an old skool website served from a home directory like it is here at ~/azh 👌.

After my recent foray into Flexbox I started Wes Bos’ CSS Grid course too. I’m about 8 videos in and my initial impression is that it’s impressive what can be achieved with Grid - layouts that would be very hard without it are simple.

Also, the Developer Tools for Grid are mightily impressive to a guy who started out using Microsoft Notepad and “View Source”.