Learning How to Work in a Team

I am working on a new feature for one of our microservices. It’s about a medium-sized T-shirt that involves working with AngularJS’s ui-router, working with new API endpoints, and writing some CSS from scratch. I’m excited! And a little daunted…

To work against being overwhelmed and becoming unproductive, I focused on tackling the hardest part first – the routing and views. I knew that I was going to work with ui-router, so I read through a few tutorials and brushed up on routing in AngularJS.

I then put together quickly some mock views to connect to the new states and routes. This felt better than starting to code markup and styling, I had to remove the unknown first.

The tutorials only got me so far, so I stopped and thought about it. I did some searches on Google. After a few iterations on this cycle, I reached out to a coworker. Instead of telling him it’s broke give me the codes!, I explained what I had done, what I was trying to achieve, and what wasn’t happening as I expected. Rather than him coming to help me google, it turned into a discussion about patterns, structuring code, and a brief pair-programming to get something working quickly. I even got some praise that my initial concept is good and that I should just find the right balance, between sound design and time spent on the solution.

I thought of this article after the whole discussion with my coworker.

A First Day with Test-Driven Development

This is a little late, but better late than giving up.

Yesterday was hard. I spent the whole day, trying to get a testing stack going with Mocha, Chai, and AngularJS. It didn’t work, so I switched to Karma, Chai, and AngularJS. It kinda worked, but not entirely. So I switched to Jasmine. Still no cigar.

It was frustrating and a little demoralizing. But, I’ll try again on Monday.

My Complicated Relationship with Writing

I’ll spare you the platitudes of how life has been so busy, or I’ve been through so many changes, or any of that. I haven’t written in a long time, here, on this blog. The only reason is that my relationship with writing is complicated, not in the way that Facebook has now appropriated, but in that it was a non-relationship. Complicated could point at how I carry writing on my arm, as a trophy wife, but at home I beat her to death by neglect.

I didn’t write that novel I announced with much fanfare on Medium and here. I have been preoccupied with discovering who I am. Yeah, not rediscovering, but discovering.

I’m working on not killing you anymore, honey.

There will be no promises or announcements, no lofty goals or projects. I hope that there will be a public reconciliation with this thing I love and discard so much, writing – the closest I’ve ever been to a real relationship.

How to Medicate

Wherever I go,

Which ever passport I carry,

No matter which accent I speak with,

No matter what God I believe in,
I’m a sandnigger to people.

Verified by ExactMetrics