Yesterday’s installment including The Design and Testing the App can be found here. Pomodoro Break Getting the App side of the project into reasonable shape took 14 pomodoros (6 hours of work time). This seems like a good point to reflect a little. I started with the App side, because I know it is a weak point for me. Working in Pomodoros, I was highly productive the first day with the exception of the end of the day. That hour-and-a-half of unstructured time, working in frustration at being stuck with a view component not behaving the way I wanted it to, was the least productive time of the...

Yesterday’s installment including the TL;DR, Background, The Project, Ground Rules and The Work sections, can be found here. The Design One thing you should know about me: I am a horrible UI designer. I wouldn’t even begin to talk about UX. My goal here was to make something that my wife would find easy to use. I knew that if it was easy for her to use, she would use it. And I knew I would too. It’s also the reason I decided to focus on the App side first. I knew it would take me longer than the server side. I can write server side APIs in my sleep! My first pomodoro was spent just...

TL;DR: My yearly performance review revealed that I have a tendency to over architect code. I write too much too early. Using the Pomodoro Technique, a few ground rules and a rigorous commitment to coding only what was needed, I created an iPhone app with a full stack backend in 20 hours over the course of 11 days. My wife and I are now using the app on a daily basis. All the code is open source and can be found here (server) and here (iPhone app). Background I work on a small development team for Didit, Inc. We are dedicated to an Agile methodology that suits our needs (mainly Kanban) and we have an...

Last week, all of us in the dev team at Didit got to go to the SCNA conference in Chicago. I came away very inspired with an expanded view of Software Development. Presentations from Bob Martin (Uncle Bob) and Zed Shaw (among others) focused on practicing coding like a musician practices their instrument and coding as often as possible (as opposed to getting mired in ideology and methodology). Among the things I learned was the idea of coding Katas. These are small, but often tricky, problems designed to hone coding skill, more so than to find a solution to the problem. It’s all about...

This post is about replacing the keypad on the game Dark Tower. If you’re not interested in my nostalgic blathering, click here to get right to the instructions. Nostalgic Blathering For those of you not familiar (because you’re too young or live under a rock), Dark Tower was one of the first interactive electronic board games that was massed produced. It was released in 1981 and I got one for my 13th birthday. It blew my mind – not only because it was fun to play – but because of the possibilities that electronics could bring to gaming. I had been hacking around on Pet...