AgileGame: At Work

12/12/14

So, today was the first day I gave a solid try at doing a work version of AgileGame.

Great success.

I'm kinda doing a Pomodoro Technique sort've thing in tandem with it.

Today, shortly into my day, I made a directory, initialized a git repository, added a submodule of AgileGame, and symbolically linked to the main repository of what I was working on (too big to just make a submodule of it like I would like). I set a twenty-five minute timer, made a goal, and got to work.

At the end of the timer, I made a red mark on my whiteboard. I failed to meet the goal as I defined it. But I was still happy with the progress I made. I still learned a lot in those 25 minutes. I literally deleted the code I wrote.

And I started again. With an updated, harder goal.

I made another red mark. I was really close to the updated goal, though. I also got noticeably better at making Google Tests since the previous session.

I played a couple more times, and got my work to a point where I needed to converse with others to figure out my next steps. In the end, there were two green marks and two red. If I were properly strict, however, it'd have been three red marks and one green mark.

The next pomodoro will be better. Maybe all this practice will improve my node.js practice (which I'm still being really bad about). For sure, I'm reducing the hour work to something even shorter. I might even try for an even shorter time span for the game.

In fact, on this here chromebook that I'm attempting to develop productive habits on (like writing this blog post), I have installed a chrome extension called Screencastify. The free version can only do ten-minute recordings at a time. That could be quite valuable. Incredibly quick prototype creations, and speedruns of basic programs that should force me to develop a deep understanding of the languages, libraries, algorithms, etc. that I am dealing with.

I'm pretty excited about further iterations of this game.