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Brittany Joiner
Brittany Joiner

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Developer Diaries: Week 8 - Life happens

I'll be honest, I don't have a ton to write about this week, but I'm still trying to keep the weekly habit, so I'll say a few things quickly.

Life is distracting (that's okay)

I moved to Baton Rouge about a year and a half ago, and while hurricane season hits Lousiana, it doesn't seem to do too much to Baton Rouge, but Hurricane Ida was an exception. I usually don't worry too much about nearby hurricanes because I'm not on the coast, so there's not much to worry about. But this one turned out to be a pretty serious one and managed to inflict some damage pretty close to us. Thankfully my family and I were okay - didn't even have any power outages, but it's been pretty rough for Baton Rouge (a lot of the city has been without power), and for just about anything 20 minutes south of us has been straight up devastating with damages to homes and roads, traffic lights out, and water in more places than it should be.

And then Ida had the nerve to keep going up north and devastate New York and New Jersey! Thinking of all the folks who've been impacted by this storm. Definitely has had me pretty distracted this week, and I wasn't even seriously impacted. Thankful for a team that's been very understanding and given me the space and time to check on my home and family/friends and be as available with them as I need to this week.

If you're able, Gizmodo has compiled a list of places to give to help victims from these storms. (I donated to Cajun Navy as I kept seeing them come up in a few of my searches.)

Testing

This week I've been cleaning up some PRs I had out and incorporate some testing pieces in them. Sometimes, I'm like "yay testing, that's a great idea." And sometimes, I just get lazy. I'm working on having a better perspective and getting good at understanding what's good enough to move on, because it's easy to feel like you need to boil the whole ocean with testing. I create one test, then think of six more scenarios!

Leslie Knope and dry erase board - overwhelmed

At the moment, my goal is to keep it roughly within the scope of the issue I'm solving for, but I'm excited for next sprint which will give me some dedicated issues to set up testing across our front end. It will nice for that to be the "main issue", rather than some extra work I'm having to do on top my initial issue.

Everything's a sort function

I had a bit of a mind blowing moment this week when I realized a lot of functions are really just fancy "sort" functions that compare info and output something based on the comparison.

That's all folks. Stay safe, hug your loved ones, and keep learning, even on the hard weeks.

Top comments (1)

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Conan

Didn't realise how corrupted I was by the word sort in a programming context, but that's actually a nice way to think about pure functions: Take input. Sort it. Get output. Thank you.