Bottighofen, Balance and Javascripty stuff

Since Monday I have been in the Swiss office with a team called All Inclusive.

Working on production code

In this team I got to take a user-story from Jira, this initial story ended up being far more complicated then predicted, so it needed a lot of assistance.

However yesterday I was given a different minor fix, a classic Javascript undefined error. And I wrote tests for the fix and fixed it! Wooo. And by doing so, I learnt a few Javascript functionalities:

• The ternary operator ?: Which is a way of representing a conditional through like: Conditional ? Statement 1 : Statement 2 which is the same as if (Conditional) return (Statement 1) else (Statement 2)

• I also learnt that if you wish to imbed a value into a String like :

  const moreBlah = 'blah blee blah blah';
  const myBlah = `blah blah ${moreBlah} blah`;
  

  Then back-ticks are required instead of normal quotation marks.

• Oh and DON’T FORGET THAT SEMI COLON.

I enjoyed solving this issue, submitting a fix has given me a proper insight into how a developer works in in the company. More little tasks like this would be cool. It also gave me the opportunity to learn some JavaScript.

Balance

Since starting the business stage I’ve been finding it quite difficult to balance; exploring new teams and participating in my weekly product team, staying involved with the apprenticeship team and continuing my personal development with my own projects and learning. I feel a bit spread thin.

But I think I just need to structure my time better and not get too sucked into finding out complex Haskell applications. The last couple of days has been figuring out how to use the aeson library (blog post to come) and although I figured it out, it was heavily filled with functors, which, if I understood beforehand, I would of been able to proceed a lot faster. So when I next face an issue that is halting me, I need to think about WHAT is the issue and whether I have the pre-requried knowledge to troubleshoot. Or do I need to research these small pieces of information in order to make me capable of troubleshooting.

Also, I have been not creating a blog everyday recently, and when I do, they allow me time to reflect on what I’m doing. So if I do not feel that I have enough time to write a blog at the end of the day, then maybe I’m overloading myself and not managing my time efficiently.

TL;DR: To much time over the last couple of days has been spent looking up how to do something which I didn’t know how to do, because I didn’t understand what the components of the method did.