Coding and Beer

I haven’t blogged much lately.  A lot of things have happened in my life in the last year that focused my efforts elsewhere.  I thought I would go ahead and jot down some notes.

Being a supervisor, I rarely get to code much anymore.  Lately I have been getting to do so on a project I wrote a while back.  I needed to add new functionality to it and it needed to have a design overhaul to accommodate the changes.  You know how you always have the “I would totally change that if I were to write it again” thoughts after finishing an application? Well, I get to make those changes to this app.  The new functionality isn’t a priority to finish fast, so I get to work on the app in-between other work.  This allows me to slow down on it and really update it correctly.  I’m removing a bunch of jQuery based javascript I wrote at the time and replacing the client UI interactions with a binding framework.  I chose KnockoutJS for that.  I also removed a bunch of CSS and leveraged BootStrap a lot for layout and base styles.  These two improvements required me to dig in and learn some new things, but the amount of CSS and javascript has significantly dropped on this project so far.  It has a responsive design now which will be great for mobile device use.  I love re-sizing the window and watching the elements flow correctly.  The rework will extend all the way to the database table structure, so I will be plowing through the ASP.NET MVC and SQL database layers as well by the time this project is over.

On a personal level, I started working out again.  It feels really good.  I have dropped about 15 pounds over the last year.  I hope to drop 15 more to get to my ideal weight.  It’s really hard because I love eating good food and drinking great beer.  We are still a cable/sat free household.  Netflix gets used more than I would like, but at least the price of that is small in comparison.

Spring is here, so it is time to start planning the garden and summer projects.  My wife asked me to build a pergola before July.  That should be easy, but I also have other large landscaping projects in mind as well and they also need to be finished before July.  Just got to figure out how to fund it.

A blog entry by Mike Crittenden titled “Coding skill vs. employee skill” got me thinking.  When I was heavy into development, I valued the Coding Skill person more because I was working with code all day.  As I transitioned into a supervisory role, I’m now looking for more Employee Skills from my people.  So I would say he was right on the mark in his post.  Just thought I would pass along the link for others to read.

There is an awesome feeling that comes from building a dynamic calendar in HTML.  The steps:

1. First you have to build a object structure (assuming you are using an OO language) to support the month, weeks, days, and content within each day.
2. Then you have to instantiate the structure based on the month rendered and query the database and load the content within it.
3. Of course, next comes the actual rendering of the calendar structure in HTML.  Use a table?  I started there, but then my friends laughed at me (not really, but I think they would if they had seen it).  I used the good old div tag.
4. Last, you need to style it with CSS.  To me, this was the hardest part.  Getting the correct float and borders applied to make it look halfway decent was an hour exercise – this is one of my weaker areas I’m trying to improve.

It felt good to finish it and see the results.  I know it is relatively trivial to some degree, but still rewarding to see the results.

Of course, I wasn’t finished.  I had to add some flashy AJAX popup when the contents of the calendar are clicked.

Overall, I believe adding the calendar view of the data will make the application easier to use for most people.  Seeing data in lists works well, but sometimes when that data is date based, there is no better display than a good old calendar.

I have been fighting a bad design for a few days now.  It felt like I was continuing to make trade offs I wasn’t happy with.  What the hell, it’s Friday and I’m a bit squirrely … time to do some serious refactoring.  I completely changed the interface to my state machine and at the same time redesigned the database to make sure I couldn’t build my project for another day our two.

Visual Studio keeps lying to me saying I only have 50 errors.  We both know that I have hundreds more than that to get through…

Even with the big error list, it is the right thing to do at this point.  I will come out on the other end with a more flexible and maintainable design.  Getting excited again after feeling bogged down over the last few days.