I got fixated on a particular calculation Monday evening, and ended up spending too much time figuring out something that I most likely will not use. By the end of my session on Monday it was working, but I should have bypassed the issue until I was sure I needed to finish it.
Day T-35 to T-34 Accomplishments (Sunday-Monday, March 7-8, 2010)
The first week of March was spring break for my college son, so we spent time at family in Florida, then Alabama (both were a little cooler than normal.) He had been hard at work sketching and thinking about his game idea during the break, and during the last part of the week, I got to help by building a prototype for him to try various combinations of game gestures and timings. It was fun working together on it, and well worth the diversion of my iphone dev time.
Day T-38 to T-36 Accomplishments (Thursday-Saturday, March 4-6, 2010)
I narrowed down my memory problem to an extra release of a custom property, but it took me too long to find it. It is a little frustrating that my Objective-C debugging skills feel so far behind those I have in the Java world.
I tried several different methods of tracking down the extra release, but the simplest method proved effective–double checking every possible reference to the property by visual inspection. I need to find better methods for this sort of thing, but for now I am back on track.
Day T-39 Accomplishments (Wednesday, March 3, 2010)
I didn’t spend much time on iPhone on Tuesday.
Day T-40 Accomplishments (Tuesday, March 2, 2010)
I so dearly love memory management problems — they are always so easy to find and fix…sure. I had a couple of hours of focused time this evening for development work, but unfortunately wasted the last half trying to find a memory allocation bug.
In some recent refactoring I introduced a double release somehow, but after an hour of late evening head banging, I could not find it and decided the wisest course of action was to drop it for the evening — hopefully I will find and fix the issue within the first little bit of my next session. I believe I at least know when I introduced the bug, so hopefully this will be another demonstration of “version control software is my friend”.
Day T-41 Accomplishments (Monday, March 1, 2010)
I did no coding on Sunday, but did get comfortable on the couch with a couple of development books:
Day T-42 Accomplishments (Sunday, February 28, 2010)
I had to choose one of two goals for today: better material handling, or better movement processing. In thinking through what each meant, I realized that the better material handling is really dependent on smarter movement processing so I dove in. We are almost to my brother’s house, but I finished the core refactoring that should provide more efficient handling of movement, better coverage that will support the material handling better, and simplification of several classes.
Day T-43 Accomplishments (Saturday, February 27, 2010)
I am heading out of town on a two week trip, visiting family in Florida for a week, then on to Alabama to help my daughter and her husband move to a new house. I have enough work commitments that I’ll probably try to get in 60-70% of my normal consulting work hours, but I also hope to elicit some good feedback on my app (and continue making progress!). It is far enough along that I can explain where I am going, have folks try it, make some changes, etc. It will also be a sanity check on what they think the “fun” factor is.
A key part of the game involves digging with tools of different shapes and sizes. I want the tool face (width of a shovel, bucket, etc.) to rotate to be perpendicular to the current direction of the touch movement, and tonight I got that behavior working correctly. As you move around, the screen is updated as I expected.
Next on my list of things to accomplish is a more realistic movement of material. Currently, the tool picks up material along the path of movement, but without limits–a shovel with infinite capacity. I have placeholders for capacity and some reasonable ideas of how to handle it–perhaps tomorrow.
Day T-44 Accomplishments (Friday, February 26, 2010)
I didn’t spend a lot of time evaluating things at the mid-point — my natural tendency is to over analyze, so I’m going to give it a quick check:
My project is a game that involves digging motions where you push material around with touches. Today I modified my tool handling to start taking into account the direction of the movement. I added code for rotations as well as decent unit tests, but still have some odd behavior with the gestures–fixing that behavior will have to wait until Friday.
Day T-45 Accomplishments (Thursday, February 25, 2010)
Last Thursday was the last time I worked on my project–I was sure I had control of my schedule and that I would be able to spend most of Friday working on it as well. But, on Friday, my schedule took control of me instead and I only escaped this morning. My main consulting project consumed most of that time, but we pushed the latest release out to QA this morning, and I believe the next few days will be a great opportunity to get some quality time in on my iPhone project.
I left my project in a broken state the last time I worked it, including a stupid, but insidious bug that would have taken the entire evening to track down if I didn’t have a decent set of unit tests for that particular class. Fortunately, after about 20 minutes of remembering where I was, the failing tests pointed me to a small block of code and led to a fairly quick fix.
I once again believe I will be able to spend most of tomorrow on this project (hope springs eternal!). But, even if I can’t, at least I am leaving my project in a working state.
Day T-46 Accomplishments (Wednesday, February 24, 2010)
I consider myself a software craftsman -- I take pleasure in building solid systems that provide just what my clients need.
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