Personal Agile: Iteration 4

Interesting iteration. Overall agile approach has been a net positive. I likely would’ve have been approximately as successful, but deliberate approach to planning and reviews yields interesting artifacts (of which this blog post is one) and provides for an interesting trajectory overview.

I made good progress on my tasks this iteration:

• adding two additional chapters reviewed to “First 90 days”. It’s becoming a bit tedious, but I feel it’s critical to finish this book.
• moving forward with my org-friend SwiftUI project.

In terms of my application, I feel like I’ve committed two cardinal sins of software engineering

1. I started gold plating.
2. I added more work to an iteration that’s already in progress.

Scope creep and gold plating

When I initially started this project, the goal was a really simple utility application. Which means minimal UI. However as things progressed, it became apparent that there needs to be a splash screen, a settings screen and a “log view”. Even though the fundamentally the application has been working since the second iteration, I haven’t been happy with the overall visual appearance. So I’m working on that now. I reached out to some folks that I know, but they are busy. I approach some contractors on Fiverr with some success. In any case, the takeaway here is that suddenly I’m spending more time on look and feel for an application that’s supposed to spend most of it’s time in the background. The justification I use is that since this is a showcase for my work, a portfolio piece, I want it to look nice. First impressions and all.

Here’s a UI designed by a developer. No good.

Adding work to an iteration in progress

I got mixed feelings about this one. Personally I don’t think this is a huge problem if negotiated properly. In a team of 1 it’s really easy. In a larger team this would have to be managed very carefully and be an exception. I’m doing this for fun largely so I roll with it.

Conclusion

Overall a healthy and productive iteration. I made progress on both of my little projects. One area where I hope to improve is time tracking. I know I’m missing time here. This is largely the function of learning Emacs.