My life; set to music

While I'm on the topic of those in-the-moment calming tunes, here's another one that I came across a while back while listening to last.fm. She was playing in Vancouver recently, but unfortunately I missed it. Next time I'll be there =0)

There are a few times a year when I'll hear a tune that will instantly calm the chaos of urban life that goes on around me. Today was one of those days.

I was browsing around the web and came across "Girls" by Takagi Masakatsu and everything went calm.

So, recently I've been going through some thought processes realizing that I really need to set some new goals in my life.

At the age of 16, I knew that I really didn't want to do the whole college/university thing. I ended up doing it my way and going directly into the workplace. My first full time programming job didn't go hugely well, but I learnt a hell of a lot and made a lot of connections that I still have. After that things weren't so easy for a young, un-qualified perl hacker in Northern Ireland so I ended up relenting and going to college for a while. During this time, my personal life changed and I fell in love.

From that point I had my goal:

1. Get a job
2. Do well at it
3. Get married after my fiancee left university (4 years)
4. Be able to support myself and my new wife
5. Hit the mid/senior level developer point in my career
   

So, I left college, started working my ass off and about a year or two ago I reached that goal. Since that point I've been a bit stuck and not really knowing where I want to go or what to do. So, I've now got to the point where I need to examine what I really want to do, where I want my career to go and also what I want to do in life in general.

Anyone got any tips, things to read?

So I've just signed up with Remember the milk to try it out with doing GTD stuff. It's a nice and lightweight web app, plus it's got a glorious feature... Google gears hooks! So, no matter where I am or if I have a net connection or not, I'll be able to update, track and complete tasks on my lists.

I'll give it a try then post a review if all goes well.

Hey all,

This week I've decided that I need a few weeks off to attend to my health. Burning the candle at both ends has been rather taxing on my system and I need to try and get into a better condition to avoid burning myself out for the day job.

So I've been doing little pieces here and there that are related to the socialtext wikitest stuff because it's related to what I'm doing both for the project and at work. I'll probably done some hacking at home here and there, but for the next few weeks I'm on downtime.

Until later!

--
-Scott-

Passed!

3 days, 13 hours!

1. Got initial selenium tests up and running (and passing!)
2. Started second story
3. Spent quite a while on working out how to effectively mock the catalyst context object so that I can test controllers, models and views independently. This is going to take a while, and i'll probably end up writing a helper package to more easily deal with it.
4. lukec++ for mocked and also for letting me add a feature or two, should come in very handy when handing stuff to other people to have a peek at the tests.
5. Talked with some catalyst folk about areas which will need unit testing, but I couldn't easily grasp how to do. mst++ for giving me the details.

This week was really productive and I got 90% of the hours done towards the start of the week, letting me spend my weekend socializing and spending some good quality time with my wife. Although there's not a whole lot of code that's been written, I've essentially clocked what's required for proper unit testing of Catalyst which will make the whole thing go a whole bunch more smoothly.

However, writing all the selenium tests, by hand is actually rather painful as I've seen before and compared to the last project I was doing selenium testing on, I'm being a lot more strict and paranoid up front. While this is better in the long term, there's a rather large associated up front cost involved. We've been using fitnesse at work combined with selenium to do a bunch of automated system tests, but I don't really want to have to enforce everyong running java to contribute. lukec++ has done something very similar with socialtext wiki called SocialText::WikiTests, which would suit a whole bunch more, but it doesn't really allow for the more distributed work that's needed.

So i might have a look at hacking lukes code from WikiTest into something like tiddlywiki or stickwiki so that I can have all the fun, but have it very compact and also have the ability to check the whole thing into the repo.

So, so far, things are going awesome, just need to get my ass into overdrive and get the others involved a little motivated.

later!

I failed... =0(

3 days, 6 hours.

1. Finally got selenium working after having to work out some issues with selenium server and Firefox 2.0.0.2
2. Added initial acceptance test!
3. Added a stories directory to the repo
4. I found the text files a little hairy so started playing with some DSL and javascripty stuff.

I ended up house/dog sitting for some friends this week and ended up not feeling too great, so I ended up slacking a fair bit. However, I have all of this evening scheduled to hack away! So time to start hacking up some stories.

POT TOTAL: $20

So this week I narrowly got the quota, plus I sent an email to the mailing list of folks who are interested.

3 days, 10 hours.

1. Got a list of features together.
2. Started to break stuff up into stories.
3. Did lots of reading on market requirements and other stuff.
4. Got initial import of base Catalyst app.

I wasn't very pleased with the progress I made, but I got a lot of important stuff out of my head and onto paper. An interesting point to make is that XP doesn't talk a lot about the role of the customer. It made me realize how important and difficult the role of the customer is in XP, so good product managers are worth their weight in gold.

So, I've met with this weeks quota!

4 days, 11 hours.

1. Set up a subversion repository (4-5 hours).
2. Hunted people down and gave them access to the repo (1-2 hours).
3. Braindumped my ideas into a mindmap and added it to the repo (2-3 hours).
4. Read up on product/release planning, but need to have a chat with someone who's done it before (3-4 hours).

By the end of the week I was starting to wain a little, but that's mainly due to the fact I had a super productive week at work and it was quite mentally tiring. However, because I've been getting so much stuff done, I've been feeling super productive and generally just really good. So all in all, I think it's working!

So, I've got a real truth to tell you and mum, I'm sorry that this is the way you have to hear about this...

I am a serial procrastinator!

Yes it's true! If I don't have to do something here and now, I tend to put it off. I pick up projects and then drop them after a while from a lack of enthusiasm. I do help out a fair bit with some stuff on CPAN and am generally available to people for help, advice and testing stuff. While this is all very worthwhile stuff, I don't tend to feel I've accomplished much and I'm a little tired of feeling that I'm not doing very much worthwhile stuff (in a personal capacity anyways).

I've got a personal project that I've been planning and even though I've requested that people keep bugging me about it, they've not be overly buggy, so... you lot; you've got the sack! I've now got a few people interested in my little project and that's the motivational drive I'll have to go from (along with getting my wife to actually take an interest). However I still have one problem, I need to really start kicking things off to get the ball rolling, after that I know I'll be able to cope.

So... here's an idea I've come up with to try and get me rolling.

The Procrastinators Tax:

1. I must work on $project at least 3 days out of every week.
2. I must work on $project at least 10 hours each week.
3. I must keep other people involved updated on my progress at least once a fortnight.
   
4. I must have visible and sharable results within 2 months of today.
5. If I fail to meet either rule 1 or 2, I must submit $20 CAD to the 'pot' for every infraction. If I fail to meet rule 3, I must submit $50 to the 'pot' for every infraction. If I fail to meet rule 4, I must add $200 to the 'pot'.
6. At the end of the 2 month period I must give the complete 'pot' to a charity at the choosing of a randomly selected friend.
7. As per common sense, if something odd comes up that's out of my control, I can suspend all these rules until things are back to normal, however I must continue on as if the suspension had never taken place. I will hold my wife as a fair judge of what a good reason for suspension is.

So here goes! I'll try and keep things updated here to inform everyone of how things have been going and more importantly, how much I owe!

PS: (yes... I AM a tight git).