AsynchronousBlog

Testing.

This is primarily a test in order to get some content, such that I can…

1. rebuild site
2. fetch page
3. hack CSS
4. create stylesheet for basic site.

It just needs to NOT be fugly.

I’ve continued to work pretty hard, but it looks like the initial burden of creating a 1.0 system is done. Now we’re in that wonderful time of reflection, rating, and looking forward to the future.

reflection

There are plenty of things that go wrong when creating a software system. Testing being the biggest failure — without a major internal impetus to TestFirst. We’ve been encouraged to start doing TestFirst Development in our next milestone, and I’m jumping on the bandwagon. It seems tailored to fast-paced, [short-attention span], younger developers … but as one of those, I welcome the lessons to be learned.

rating

We just went through our first-quarter engineering assessment. I scored well. Some of the best developers I’ve met didn’t. It’s kinda f’ed up.

[agg]regating

I’ve started playing with NewsMonster over this holiday weekend. It’s a standalone-java site-aggregator engine with a Mozilla-based front-end. I’ve set up a bunch of feeds in it, and hopefully it’ll break me from having Slashdork as my consistently-open browser window… it’s gotten me to want to blog more [as evidenced by this post], but perhaps more importantly to make the BlogPlugin I’ve talked about for a while.

I’ve been working quite hard, and a bit of a toll is being incurred. But mostly on cool new projects that I keep thinking up. There’s something about hard creative work that fuels other creative impulses. As I’m ” such a geek”, as Mary said the other day, they’re mostly technical, but some not. I hope in the coming months to have some time to outlay them here and into the wider world.

One day, too, I’ll be a good programmer. Due to test-first practices and making refactoring my bitch, it hasn’t slowed others on the project down too much … but one day I’ll be able to get the DesignThatIsNowClear on the first go-round, rather than the third. Here’s to the future.

Quote of the Day: “Yup, nothing says “protagonist” like going into a berserker rage over pork chops.”

So, we’ve moved into San Francisco. The City. Ah. Yeah. And freaky people have kids. Oh, the humanity.

Awesome video for some new J5 song — The Format —

Startups rule. It’s very hard to find a place where the work is so exciting, you know the whole company, and every day, hour and minute of your efforts has a tangible effect on others. The only problem is that every day, hour and minute of your efforts has a tangible effect on others. When you’re young and stupid, you think that you can’t and shouldn’t stop. It doesn’t quite help that you may totally enjoy what you’re doing, day-to-day, and not want to leave … because that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Especially when you have to move to San Francisco and stuff.

Oh well.

It is a lot of fun.