I’ve not been doing a good job at blogging the last week or so. We’ve had swimming lessons everyday at 4:20, which means I need to stop pushing buttons about two hours earlier than usual, and thus when I come back at it in the evening after the boys are in bed, I’ve been finishing up what I didn’t finish earlier and then blogging short pieces of crap. So while I have in fact written, the product of my writings is not good enough to post.
Today, however, I kept a sick little boy home with me. Leo slept in unusually long this morning, so right off the bed, i was a little concerned about him–especially since he ‘spilled’ Friday evening and had some other weird things going on all weekend. When I stood him up to walk, he was struggling to balance–I don’t think he was disoriented or anything, I think he was just not feeling well & tired, both of which made the concept of standing and balance a bit much.
On our way to school, i was apprehensive about dropping him off the entire way, especially when I realized he hadn’t gobbled down his morning madeleine. When I went to potentially get him out of his seat, I’d noticed that he’d spilled again–just a little, but enough to give me a hint.
So i kept him home. He was still off all morning, but back to his Leo-self by afternoon.
As for last week, a few brilliant things occurred. Well, first, once again, I did not complete my iteration, but this time around, it was for different reasons. One of the tasks was to update all the trello badges with the poker estimates. The badges, however, did not seem to be accessible outside of the outside of trello.
What?!
Yeah. So when you set a power up, you can tell Trello where to make requests to in order to receive its direction. This is done within an iframe within trello. From here, you can set badges, and update nearly anything you want. However, when the external server makes a request, Trello limits what it allows.
I mentioned several weeks ago how frustrating it was that Trello did not consider the ‘Lists’ to be formal scopes of itself, so even to manipulate a list, i had to do a little work around. I was successful at this despite it taking much longer than I’d anticipated.
But when it came to updating the badges, I could not see a way, so as a means of communication, i emailed Micah to let him know that this story would need to be re-estimated. Then in iteration, i explained the issue. He took a brief look at it too, and then wanted to sleep on it.
On Thursday, we chatted again, and he asked me to keep trello on hold for now. Then he asked something spectacular of me. He asked me to work with Josh, our new apprentice, to help guide him through some TDD with the euler problems. I’m not going to lie, i was trilled!
First, I love teaching–for whatever reason, I have always loved teaching. More than this though, is that Micah asked me to do this. This meant that he had confidence in my abilities to do this. I didn’t take that lightly. This meant a lot.
So, I got on a Tuple with Josh, and we paired for the remainder of the day. Josh is a good student. He is eager to learn and seems to absorb the information that you give him–and even if he doesn’t absorb immediately, he takes notes to look back on.
We worked on euler 9, which, admittedly, is one of the harder problems to solve. We went about it, and had two “this is why we test” moments. The first was when we were solving the problem complete wrong–for whatever reason we were looking for consecutive numbers instead of just increasing numbers, so when we tested a function with a number (1000) that we knew should return a value, it didn’t. We were both dumbfounded at first, like “um… this should be passing. There is no reason for this not to be passing!”. And then “Oh! We’re doing it wrong!” blah.
That was embarrassing for me at first, but that’s when i realized that, while embarrassing for me, it was a good teaching moment about tests. Had we not been writing tests, and simply been coding on, we may be completed the whole problem, thinking it was ready to go, and then been disappointed in that it didn’t produce the correct answer as well as frustrated in that we wouldn’t have known why or where we went wrong.
The tests saved us here, so we were able to regroup immediately and make corrections to both the tests and the code.
Then! Then we had the bowling-aha! Which to be honest, i think i’ve only witnessed experiences, and perhaps experienced on a small level once myself. We had code and tests that we got passing. Then we wrote the next test, which at least, I’d expected to most likely fail, but it passed! It passed!
So we solved it. But…. It took a looooooong time, so i explained that it wasn’t good enough. At this point we had our tests, so there was no harm in refactoring, and so we did. In the end it took about 0.49 ms to compile. Yay!
I have a few other ‘projects’ going on now that Micah has assigned to me. First is to make a web-app template that we can pull & clone and just use to develop new pages as needed. Cool. Seems easy–but my tests aren’t passing–sorry, my test isn’t passing. Then again, i had Leo home all day, so my focus was very broken.
The other is to create a standard login, but with the intent to create a new workspace board. This is to replace the trello integration. Micah asked me hesitantly while considering that I’ve now spent nearly two months on trello, how i felt about it. I told him that I think we can do it better.
He agreed in more artistic language. And so, he gave me my next assignment. Come up with a workspace plan and do.
Another big responsibility that I am so pleased to have.
At the literal end of what I do, i may just be pushing buttons all day, but i try very hard to make those buttons have meaning! And with this, i will push all the buttons to make somethin
Rex: Last week, i had so much to say about these two boys, which may have been another reason i didn’t write–as I just could pick the thing to write.
But this little man is poddy trained! A huge accomplishment for him. He is proud and so are we. He has been working very hard over the last two weeks to make this happen. It took some coaxing and quite a bit of bribery, but he’s not had a single poopy diaper in a week. And, on saturday, (for a bribe) he wore underwear the entire day and has not gone back. He still asks for pull ups sometimes, be he’s actually been getting really upset at bedtime when we put diapers on him.
Leo: Leo has been crawling on the floor, panting with his tongue out on a daily basis. I tell him, “good dog, Leo!” and he looks at me and just laughs.
Then he’ll hide his eyes behind his hands, and I’ll say “Leo? Leee-o? Leo where are you? Where did you go Leo?” and he will sit there giggling thinking that he is just the funniest because mom can’t see him because he can’t see mom. Then he’ll put his hands down and give his amazing, single-dimpled smile.