matthewninja

Work-School balance

I’ve taken a bigger role at VendorPM. What was supposed to be a two week contract has turned into a permanent commitment.

VendorPM

Since VendorPM has consumed my life for the past month, this will be a THICK section

What We Achieved

In the current sprint, spanning 1.5 weeks, my team has smashed 80 stories. I’ve billed 155.5 hours since joining VendorPM on February 11th. I’ve made 200 commits, with over 20,000 diffs. And thus, we’re on schedule for an enormously successful launch on March 16th, when our sprint ends.

Hiring

I’m pleased to say that I hired two more developers to support this sprint. My first hire was a database administrator. I brought him in to help with VendorPM’s transition from Mongo to SQL. But, he also has React experience, and has amazed me with how productive he is. I realized that we couldn’t achieve a full back-end transition in the current sprint leading into our March 16 launch. I’m extremely happy with this hire.

My second hire is a front-end developer who I met at Yale University at a hackathon in October. There have been some bottlenecks, but I am satisfied with his productivity.

The Linting Rant

One of my teams developed a component of our app with no code review and very little supervision. They worked on a fork for approximately one month before sending a pull request. Their component was more or less stand-alone, so there should have been very little merge conflicts. But, when it came time for me to review the code, to my surprise, their IDE had linted every single file that they touched. Enter over 5000 diffs. First of all, those diffs are not earned, as they’re not actual contributions. But most importantly, it’s impossible for me, the one reviewing their code to discern what’s an actual change and what is some bullshit that the linter decided to do. Every tab was changed to four spaces. Every single quote was changed to double quotes. Semicolons were added on every line. And the result is that I was forced to accept the diffs and brace for the hundred bugs that resulted. Needless to say, their bugs have been dealt with. But, as I see it, a developer should never lint their files without approval from their manager.

The Commuter Rant