As I previously mentioned I freelance for a nice client right now. I am embedded into a great team and like working with these people. Summer came and our project manager was about to take his vacation. (He cycled from Finnland to Hamburg in Germany with a friend, in case you were asking. I think that’s great as I am a cycling maniac myself…)
Before he started his vacation we groomed the backlog in Trello and scheduled various tasks for me and the other freelancers. I had the seniority in the project during his absence, so I took on the load to manage the others.
After scheduling a few tasks we looked at each other and decided to schedules some more, because it felt like these were too few during his three week leave. Then we scheduled some more “just in case” we were super fast.
When was the last time you needed to display a formatted date somewhere in your applications? Since I work a lot on React (or generally JS) apps these days, I recently had the “pleasure” to format dates in JS. After receiving them from a Ruby API. Which in turn takes the (Postgres) db timestamps and converts them into Ruby (date)time objects. Oh the fun we had. “Of course” standardizations saves your ass in this situation. Usually at least.
_ This is another email I am sending while being happily busy with our newborn._
Two days ago I linked you to an article about Livable Code. Today it’s about reading code. While learning software development I often heard the phrase that you should read other people’s code because it makes you better.
I have to admin, I never purposely did so. Well, one time, I followed through the Rails framework to understand how an HTTP request is handled. But that was the exception. It turns out, I am not alone:
_ This is another email I am sending while being happily busy with our newborn._
My first job was as a software developer at Ericsson in Montreal, working with the mobile switching center that handles calls in a cellular network. There was a lot of code controlling call set-up, hand-offs, roaming etc, but I was pretty disappointed to see that it was all done with quite basic data structures and algorithms. The most interesting part I found was the code keeping track of roaming subscribers currently in the system. It consisted of one thousand binary trees, where the last three digits of the subscriber number determined which tree a given subscriber belonged to. To find a subscriber, you picked the tree based on the last three digits of the number, then traversed the tree to find the subscriber. Apart from that, it was pretty much only linked lists or simpler.
First of all, sorry for not writing to you yesterday. I spent the day in the hospital with my wife. Our second daughter was born on 1:20pm yesterday and we couldn’t be happier. Mother and daughter are both very well.
This is the reason why I won’t be able to continue writing my usual emails for the next few days.
But I will continue sending you emails. The content will be mostly “written” by other people though. 😉
Today I want to share a recent article by Uncle Bob:
Too Clean?
A week ago I mentioned my Automation project: Factory 0.1. During the last week I managed to get it to a point where it works. Today I wanted to tell you a bit about it.
This will be a lengthy, nerdy post about details and automation.
You walk into a room. You haven’t been here before but you need to find something. Your friend told you, that you’ll find it there: “It has to be there somewhere. Please just take a thorough look around!”. You find old snack boxes , papers upon papers and stuff that you wouldn’t want to touch because it looks like it might already be alive. A distinctive smell permeates the room. You don’t want to be in here for too long. But you want to find the thing…! After looking around for 10-15 minutes you notice that you lost track of where you’ve already searched before. The whole mess is just too much for you.
Yesterday I told you about our struggles with the new door bell. While, sadly, this state is still unchanged, there’s another story there that relates to software development:
The new door bell needed some power. The old one did not need this much power (230 volts), so there were no appropriate power cables laying around. That’s why we cut a different cable that lay in the vicinity but usually powers the automatic gate for the car. The plan was to have something like a t-shaped connection between the cables. So the gate would still have power, but a new cable would lead to the door bell and everything would be fine™. So I cut the power cable to the gate. What I did not know at the time was, that there are literally t-shaped connectors for power cables (not an affiliate link, just for reference. Don’t buy it! 😉).
