Day 18 – Auxano Sprint 2

Days go by quickly when you’re enjoying your work!

Scrum: Yesterday, Jon and I worked on setting up the passport controller and view. Today we’ll continue working on those and exploring the MVC framework. I hope to watch the whole pluralsight video Jeff shared with us by the end of the day. My major block is that I think I’m sick, and that’s hurting productivity.

By general consensus, we decided to start watching the ASP.NET MVC 3 Fundamentals course by Scott Allen on Pluralsight this morning. We only watched about 40% of the course, but the group benefited quite a bit from just that 40%. I believe we should watch the rest as a group or individually, but that’s personal preference. I realize we have some different learning styles in the group, and I admit that sometimes I prefer just jumping in and getting my hands dirty over watching videos and listening to lecture. I still think Scott Allen’s courses are pretty good so I’ll be finishing that this week for sure.

Today I got to mess around with html/css and Foundation, and the hours pretty much disappeared. I could spend all day doing this, and I’m glad I’m finally getting some more practice. There is so much I want to learn, but time is such a limiting factor. I would be happy working extra long hours this week, but I’m afraid my body can’t handle that right now. Wearing myself out is the last thing I should be doing – I won’t be any help to my partner or team if I can’t keep up. Speaking of partner, Jon and I were pretty productive today. We aren’t working as closely together as we should, but we’re keeping each other updated on what we’re working on and we have some good clear tasks set out for the week. The rest of the group seems to be making some good progress on the Models, Views, and Controllers they are working on as well. We should have something basic but fun to demo on Friday!

Project Auxano “Pre-Pre-Alpha-Alpha”:

I got an email from my colleagues at Destination Imagination, Inc. inquiring about whether or not I will be able to take August 7th and 8th off for the Instant Challenge writer’s conference in Minneapolis. I don’t know where I will be at that point, but I need to see about securing those days for PTO. That will depend on what client I am working with in August, and I can’t predict that right now so I’m not sure what to say. I need to remember to look into this asap.

In spite of being sick, so far this week has been much better than last week. I’m lucky to have a supportive family and a motivated and eager team to keep me going. It’s wonderful to see our work in a UI, even if it’s extremely basic stuff (probably painful to look at for experienced devs, but it’s our first time using ASP.NET MVC!).

Until tomorrow.

ShutDown(myBrain);

-R

Oh yeah, and I’m getting better at ping-pong… the new racket helped.