Day 133

This past weekend was an adventure of sorts. After departing work on Friday, I traveled to Nolan’s house, beginning what can only be described as an odious mixture of beverages, video games, and programming. In an effort to enlighten Nolan as to this programmer’s plight, I started educating him on the most basic theories of programming, and installed JDK on his computer, walking him through his first “Hello World!” program (and the requisite debugging).

In what may be deemed a bad decision, we had placed an XBox 360 in our work area, which led to frequent, long breaks in work. However, the games would re-invigorate us, turning what was usually a moderate work session into a marathon of alternating games and work. Lots of tasks were completed these days, and our skill in the games improved markedly, as well. The games functioned almost as the cliché team-building exercise, improving communication and focus, as well as the increase in confidence that comes after totally pwning those punk-ass noobs.

Familiarity with the language increased significantly. The shining example of this was a follow-up “lesson” to Nolan in which I wrote a script from scratch with absolutely no errors or omissions. The total error rate for this weekend was a lot lower than previous attempts at working, with a lot less experimenting or brute-force programming. I like the progress we’ve made, the rate at which it was made, and I look forward to continued performance, leading to a completed project and the start of major operations for the company.

Day 118

These past couple days, Nolan and I have been working every day after our respective day jobs, and we’ve made a LOT of progress. I’d say that I’ve made more progress in the past 7 days than the past month. I haven’t learned anything new, but my understanding of the architecture has improved, and when I’ve burned myself out, I occasionally streamline the existing code.

The “experiment” of today was with a page to select users for various actions. Instead of just using static links, I presented a nice form with the pictures and names of our users. You select your users and confirm to proceed, but where you go depends on an “action” variable. So, this could be used for selecting recipients for messages, or for invitations, etc. Multi-purpose. Sweet.