Retrospective: Week Four

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In an ongoing effort to make this chain as valuable as possible to myself (and possibly others), I perform a weekly retrospective of how the past week went (notes from last week). I do this on Tuesdays to avoid conflicts with B'more on Rails, which usually holds events then.

WHAT WENT WELL

• Thanks to a conversation in the #couchdb on freenode I finally understand what went wrong with my auto-replication experiment a few weeks back. It was a silly mistake on my part (replication, even auto-replication is CouchDB is uni-directional). That knowledge gap had really be festering in my mind.
• Things got easer in couchapp. In my previous retrospective, I lamented my lack of progress in / output from my chain that week. This week I was able to how to upload attachments and how to work with complex data structures
• jQuery! I am an old prototype.js coder, which I still prefer for its ability to encapsulate things in objects. I also retain a fondness for it because its Ruby-mimicking it what really allowed me to make the jump from Perl to Ruby. Still, jQuery cannot be denied so it is good to have an excuse to work with it. Couchapp is rife with jQuery, so excuse found.
• Scratched a big itch by cleaning up the command line interface to couch_docs and, more itch satiating, I can now drop / recreate CouchDB databases when pushing docs / design docs to CouchDB.

OBSTACLES / THINGS THAT WENT NOT SO WELL

• I'm back to coding, but I am not doing my git branch Pomodoros to keep things focused.
• I am on a bit of a tangent with my current couch_docs work. It does not directly tie back to my chain's stated goal of being able to update my recipe database.
• Too much learning! In addition to this chain, I also have two book clubs at the day job (Business of Software and Programming Clojure). At some point it gets to be too much. I do not think I have reached that point just yet, but I am getting pretty damn close.
• Uncommitted changes. Bad developer! BAD! I have way too many uncommitted changes in my local git repos. And by uncommitted, I mean that I have not even committed them locally. Part of this is that I am more concerned with getting a chain post done than I am with committing changes. In a pinch, I could redo my changes based on the posts. I also hate weak commit messages, so I like to think about them some.

WHAT I'LL TRY NEXT WEEK

• Remember to Pomodoro.
• Pomodoro at work (even for non-coding stuff). I will try to use the 5 minutes for book club reading.
• Commit last night's work before starting today's.

Day #30