March 07, 2002

Testing, breakfast, design

I try to work on OpenInteract every day before I go to work, but sometimes it's difficult to get revved up. However, I'm finding that writing tests when I feel like that isn't so difficult. It's a nice little habit to get into, and writing tests just feels good.

As a result of writing a set of tests this morning I missed my normal bus and decided to go out for breakfast on my way to work. (These two things are related in my head, even if they don't seem that way now.) Normally I eat nothing, sometimes a banana, sometimes some sort of granola bar. So I figured I'd try eating a big breakfast - pancakes with strawberries, brown sugar and a little whipped cream, plus some fried potatoes. (Good stuff.) No lunch after that, and I didn't get the normal 3-3:30 sleepies. Nice.

Of course, the only other reason I did this is because I knew I was going to the gym today...

More design meetings. They're actually getting kind of fun. My meeting stamina is pretty low, however. After about two hours I'm generally too fuzzy to follow along and contribute. I think you can build meeting stamina by going to lots of meetings and slowly building up the meeting times as you go, just like like you train for a marathon. But after you've run a marathon you can at least say you've done something noteworthy.

It helps me to code after the meetings to see if it feels the same way as it did in the meeting (I haven't been to enough design meetings to be able to sync the two with a substantial temporal difference) and also, hey!, to see if those crazy ideas actually work. Keeping the individual objects and actions small makes this go very quickly, even in Java :-) And it makes me feel more productive than I probably am, so it's all good.

(Originally posted elsewhere)

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