April 12, 2021
On the face of it, this didn’t feel like a productive week. I did get two things of note done:
- I shipped the standalone
checkerinfrastructure I mentioned. I punted on some of the trickier (and less important) architectural questions, like how to declare reactions to check failures; I realized it was more important for me to just get the infrastructure live and working and that more nuanced iterations would only come with experience. (To wit: there have been a lot of fast-follows, such as me immediately adding the ability to track how long a check has failed or being able to re-run checks through the admin interface.) - I shipped the “drop everything and fix this”-severity issue of the day, which was about moving web hook consumption to a stand-alone app. I wrote that I think this is an easy and solved problem, and I was right! I’ve got a Heroku standalone app for web hook consumption that deploys alongside the “main” app. I stopped myself from going ahead and using the same approach for other things (the API, the admin interface) that should be standalone as well, because it’s just not nearly as pressing.
And of course, when I view my actual commit history I got a bunch of small bug fixes in as well, even if the whole thing didn’t exactly cohere to a gestalt of “oh yes, this is the thing I did this week.” (Make Time talks about this, both at a daily and weekly cadence.) I’d like to veer away from that a bit this week, but it so often is the case that I really should focus on reactive mode and something closer to a manager’s schedule.
This week, though, I’m going to grant myself a little leeway, and just focus on snackable work — in particular, the three most common (and pernicious) bugs I know of:
- Autosaving messing with user’s cursor position while writing
- Code snippets not showing up correctly in dark mode
- Drag-and-drop imports not working on Windows
This is humble work, and if I have the time I’ll start plotting out my next big project (un-javascripting the frontend). But I worry about taking on anything too big: this is the first week since mid-March where things don’t feel like they’re operationally on fire, and I’d rather take that time to actually pay off some product debt than to plunge forward into a slightly risky work stream.