In the morning I’ve spent some more time thinking and googling around about automated testing. Not finding anything that I would like to give a try, burned a hole into my motivation. Now I realize it’s a good idea to do this kind of research later in the day, when most of my brain power was put into useful work.
Note: First do things that you know how to do.
After a half-hour walk with a latte and a muffin, it was mostly healed. During the walk I was listening to the most recent episode of the “Startups for the rest of us” podcast, and I realized how much I’d like to have some supportive and constructive people around me. Sometimes I find that the realization itself makes me feel better.
Code-wise I think that today I was a bit more productive. I moved from manual testing in the packaged app to the browser, which is faster. I got more comfortable with React and sketched a few more components and I begin to like how it’s coming together.
On the introspection side, one thing that I realized these couple of days is that when I feel stuck — for example when I didn’t know how to go about automated testing — it helps if I “change hats”: when I step back and look at that issue from the perspective of an entrepreneur, not as a programmer. I can then say: OK, I don’t know what to do now about this particular aspect, but what would be another useful thing to do to push this forward?
It’s also interesting to see the difference in decision-making process between this hackathon and the day-job at Assembla: here the decision is easy, I don’t have to agree/coordinate with a bunch other people. “Decide and move forward”, as they say in Rework. Part of the ease is the small size of the project: I have visibility over all the things to make decisions.
Overall I am happy with the work I did today.