Category: Personal

Getting it done

At my first developer job, we used a tool called Trello to track our sprint work – the stuff we had to get done every two weeks. Our process was that we would create stories and tasks on Trello, and then hand write the tasks onto PostIt notes to put on a physical whiteboard, because there is something deeply satisfying about moving a physical thing when completing a story.

The problem was, this took up time. Having a bunch of developers sitting around hand-writing tasks (with crappy hand-writing, to boot) was obnoxious. Everyone hated it, and everyone would talk about how “easy” and “dead stupid” it would be to just write some kind of app that would leverage the Trello API and generate a printer-friendly display of the tasks so we could just put those on the board. They talked about it, but…

No one did anything. Every sprint planning we’d have 3-5 developers spending an hour or two dutifully scrawling on PostIts while simultaneously bitching about how annoying it was.

Back then, my JavaScript was absolute crap (and to be honest, it still is) so I decided I wanted to get better at it, and was trying to think of a project I could use to do that. After noodling about, I realized that this “obvious” and “easy” project everyone was talking about would be a perfect fit. So I spent some time on a weekend screwing around, and created a very bare bones app that would give a sprint team their tasks, nicely laid out, with all the info that was relevant, ready to be printed out and used on the board.

I spent maybe 10 hours on it, total, and got familiar with some parts of JavaScript I hadn’t used before, so even without any other benefits, it was a win. But at work – it turned something that took up 3-10 total developer hours, per team, per every 2 weeks – into something that took about 10 minutes total. We had 4 sprint teams, and everyone started to use this, which means that my 10 hour weekend project wound up having some pretty disproportionate knock-on effects.

The thing I learned from this is that just having an idea isn’t any big deal. We ALL had the same idea. But acting on an idea – bringing it to fruition – that is special, and all-too-rare.

Posted on by Kate 0

A quick hello

A little about me, so that any readers (as unlikely as that is) have some idea of where I’m coming from with what I write:

I make my living writing software, and have for about the last 10 years. I say “about” because for at least 3-4 of those years, I was technically a research scientist who happened to write (bad) software as a way to automate some of the most boring parts of my job. I never went to school for computer science – I was a psych major. I never went to a bootcamp – I didn’t even know they existed, so I was pretty much self taught with the help of Google and Stack Overflow, with an assist from Wikipedia when I ran into conceptual difficulty. I’m pretty OK at what I do – at least, I keep on moving up in the field, so I’ve got that going for me.

For recreation I’m a pretty bog-standard geek. I like to tinker with stuff, from little side software projects to electronics and the like. It’s not just tech I potter with – I live on a farm, so I’m doing some agricultural projects as well, mostly around growing stuff to (eventually) be sold at farmer’s markets and the like.

Demographic stuff – I’m a middle aged woman, which, given my career choices, has lead to a few people referring to me as a unicorn. I don’t like that term (hence the title of this blog) because it implies that there’s something magical or special about me based purely on my not fitting the demographic profile of the typical developer, and also it implies that I have a giant growth on my forehead, which I most certainly do not.

Lastly, the reason I’m doing this blog thing is because I made it a goal to write more, and I figure documenting the various things I do is a good way to do that. Also, though improbable, what I write might help someone else, so bonus.

Posted on by Kate 0