TL/DR; This site is about fitness and technology. I have been working with technology professionally for over 20 years. I have crossed the spectrum from sys admin to junior developer to project manager to senior software engineer. I have a (perhaps unhealthy?) love affair with technology. While my main focus is software development, I love tinkering with electronics and other DIY projects. For over 10 years, I focused mainly on the Java family of technologies. I even got to co-author a book on the subject as well as having a number of articles published in trade magazines. I’m a casual grey hat,...

Yesterday’s installment, Putting it all together, can be found here. Epilogue We’ve been using the app on our iPhone every day for about a month now. Overall, I would give the app a grade of an A-. The network still gets in the way at times if there is no phone data service or the login times out. Perhaps a future version will have a local storage area that will sync transactions in the background as it is able to. But, it has not ever been enough of an inconvenience to deter us from using the app (and believe me, my wife won’t tolerate much inconvenience before she bails on an app). The...

Yesterday’s installment including the Pomodoro Break and The Server Side sections can be found here. Putting it all together I now had a front end iPhone app and back end services, both of which were tested in isolation. It was time to hook everything up. My next pomodoro was spent hooking up the settings tab of the app to the authenticate endpoint on the server side. In this case, I started with authentication since I knew that I would have to authenticate prior to being able to hit any of the other endpoints. I soon realized I would need some additional fields on the settings tab. I needed a...

Yesterday’s installment including The Design and Testing the App can be found here. Pomodoro Break Getting the App side of the project into reasonable shape took 14 pomodoros (6 hours of work time). This seems like a good point to reflect a little. I started with the App side, because I know it is a weak point for me. Working in Pomodoros, I was highly productive the first day with the exception of the end of the day. That hour-and-a-half of unstructured time, working in frustration at being stuck with a view component not behaving the way I wanted it to, was the least productive time of the...

Yesterday’s installment including the TL;DR, Background, The Project, Ground Rules and The Work sections, can be found here. The Design One thing you should know about me: I am a horrible UI designer. I wouldn’t even begin to talk about UX. My goal here was to make something that my wife would find easy to use. I knew that if it was easy for her to use, she would use it. And I knew I would too. It’s also the reason I decided to focus on the App side first. I knew it would take me longer than the server side. I can write server side APIs in my sleep! My first pomodoro was spent just...

TL;DR: My yearly performance review revealed that I have a tendency to over architect code. I write too much too early. Using the Pomodoro Technique, a few ground rules and a rigorous commitment to coding only what was needed, I created an iPhone app with a full stack backend in 20 hours over the course of 11 days. My wife and I are now using the app on a daily basis. All the code is open source and can be found here (server) and here (iPhone app). Background I work on a small development team for Didit, Inc. We are dedicated to an Agile methodology that suits our needs (mainly Kanban) and we have an...

Last week, all of us in the dev team at Didit got to go to the SCNA conference in Chicago. I came away very inspired with an expanded view of Software Development. Presentations from Bob Martin (Uncle Bob) and Zed Shaw (among others) focused on practicing coding like a musician practices their instrument and coding as often as possible (as opposed to getting mired in ideology and methodology). Among the things I learned was the idea of coding Katas. These are small, but often tricky, problems designed to hone coding skill, more so than to find a solution to the problem. It’s all about...