I admit that I have horrible organizational skills. I use different tools to account for that lack.
I love me some Kanban and it looks so pretty when I start. And then it gets left behind.
Git allows me to make cheap commits. It allows cheap branches.
The development model should be “Create Issue. Create a branch to match issue. Work the issue on the branch. Resolve issue on branch. Merge master to issue branch. Resolve conflicts. Merge the issue branch back to master and delete the issue branch.”
I have a branch which was “Add MD5 to images”. By the time I was ready to commit, I had almost 40 files that had been modified. I spent about an hour making commits. Moving to different branches to get the changes into the right branches.
Once that was done, my workflows kicked the commit because of issues. Four hours to create typing stubs and to lint the added code. Painful.
Why? Because I got the md5 done but was in the middle of using the new code, then a higher priority issue popped which got its branch but which …
About once every two weeks, I have to spend a day organizing to get things back to reasonable.
I love working at the Fort at No 4. The current director is wonderful. She is also in over her head and struggling to get everything done that needs to be done.
This leads to her moving from most important to next most important until there is no organization, no completion.
Yet, she keeps it all going. I don’t know how she does it.
Today we had a longish meeting to go over Use Cases for the new website.
For me, use cases are formalized brainstorming. Every use case is written as
“As {Actor} I {Want|Need} {something}”
The something needs to be well-defined, and it must be a single thing. You don’t write, As a web visitor, I want to be able to read the EULA and the Privacy Statement.
That is two different use cases.
As we were working our way though one section of use cases, she told me that the process of writing use cases for the website was helping her to organize her job as the director.
Which is an extra benefit.
I’m a bit tired right now. I stayed up way too late Tuesday Night, 0300 late. I’m in the making good progress, fighting my way through the tangled web of code.
Today will be an even better day.
Now all I need to do is find time to read some more court documents, without taking my blood pressure through the roof.
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