Introducing SG Hill's Tidbits of Development

Wow! It's already March!

In what seems like the blink of an eye, we've gone through:

• two project extensions in Los Angeles
• significant progress on another application for said project's client
• a theme park
• faux Christmas carols in Colorado's Breckenridge
• a personal project transition to GitHub
• 200,000 miles on United, and 50,000 on American
• significant fitness-related changes
• ...and more

All without a single [Adventures] blog post.

Yikes!

Problem

For quite a while now, I've been spending a large portion of time on purely technical tasks. In some ways, this makes it more difficult to blog — at least in part because those interested in the content of this blog (read: virtually everything but code) may not necessarily be interested in how I've helped improve my project's JavaScript with a healthy pragmatic refactoring, for example.

I've increased my technical immersion over the last few months. As we can see with this fun chart below, the result is fewer blog posts.

I'm learning more than ever these days in very specific, technical categories. This is in no small part because I have the unbelievable privilege of working with some of the best software developers and consultants on the planet at ThoughtWorks. My coworkers are often willing to help, but their example alone is enough to really help push me toward continual improvement. I'm frequently finding myself in situations where the code I've written two months ago is flat out embarrassing — which is most certainly a wonderful thing. These learnings don't quite seem to fit with the majority of the 77 posts that have preceded this one, however. A trap I've fallen into is a half-written post that never ends up published because it doesn't fit the flow this blog has carved out.

Solution

A great idea that was proposed by Sumeet Moghe at the end of TWU XVIII is advice I'm finally ready to announce I'm following: split into two blogs.

1. Adventures in [Agile] Development
2. Tidbits of Development

So, What's The Difference?

Good news! I've taken the liberty of creating a mindmap that was timeboxed to 5 minutes whilst traveling on an airplane.

Rationale

All of the above adds up to why I've started a second blog, or created a dev branch, if you will. My intent is to have a code-centric corner of the world where I can write about improvements I'm making and hopefully get feedback on where to go next and how to make things better. As a secondary benefit, I hope to simply have a log that documents the progress of a young developer, if for no other reason than I wish there was something similar I could read while in school.

Fun Fact Cronotrons may one day be the official unit of time estimation.