With another week gone, a lot of lessons have been learned. Let’s reflect on this week and the lessons included.

If I had to pick one common theme across this week, it would be insecurity. A nagging sense of insecurity has been on mu back this whole week, making me nervous as to what I’m doing and the amount of progress done during these last couple of days. At the end of the day however, I need to keep some perspective in mind, and realize that while I’m still far away from completing this month’s tasks, I still been able to do a good amount of progress, as well as learning several useful and interesting skills. Furthermore, we are still halfway through the phase, and while I would like to have some of the tasks completed by now, this would only serve to give me some peace of mind, as the amount of time left is more than enough to continue and finish in time the assigned tasks. Sometimes it’s hard to keep things in the right frame of mind, but doing so, especially in long term projects, is essential.

Let’s analyze the week by dissecting each of the activities done for each of the tasks assigned, starting with the open-source contribution for a big repo. At the start of last week, I found an interesting and seemingly easy issue in the Electron repo, which revolved around an optional property being ignored. Since the issue had some days without being solved, I figured I could take it easy and take my time to figure out exactly what the problem was. The issue came from the fact that I jumped the gun, trying to find the root of the issue without setting up a development environment properly. At the end of the week, I realized this, and to my dismay I wasn’t able to set up said environment, in part due to the complexity of the setup, and in part due to my lack of experience with the framework itself. While not much progress was made, I got a grim reminder to set my priorities straight, and to not skip steps in our tasks. I made that mistake and it took me some time, now I will have to make up for it.

Onto the next task, the workshop, I really didn’t have any idea regarding te topic I would choose. Due to this reason, I decided to focus on an Angular course, covering the framework all the way from the basics to the more complex features. Having little experience with Angular but being eager to learn more about it, I figured taking this course would inspire some ideas for my workshop. The issue here comes from the fact that the course itself is over 35 hours long, and that is only counting the video runtime, which will be lower than the real time needed for working the exercises and projects provided. This too was a reason for my stress, as I felt that my progress was quite slow. At the end of the day, however, this course isn’t a required activity for the month, and I might (and should) take my time to properly understand it and take the most advantage I can from it. Right now, I’ve come to terms with the fact that, since this will be my first workshop ever, I shouldn’t be aiming for the stars, but rather keep it simple yet interesting. With that in mind, I’ve decided to prepare my workshop based around the topic of pipes, which I hope to learn the most I can this following week. Aside from that, this week I was able to review some of the basic concepts and ideas behind Angular, as well as finally figuring out the connection between Angular and Typescript decorators.

Finally, this week I was able to read more about The Mythical Man Month. The first chapters of this book focus mainly on common pitfalls, misconceptions and administration blunders that big projects face, as well as some advice on how to deal with them. While the book shows its age in several concepts and ideas of what a computer project entails, the lessons it teaches ring way too true even to this day, and analyzing each of the ideas proposed on these chapters is definitely food for thought.

That concludes this week, I hope the next one I’ll see the fruits of the seeds planted during this last week. Cheers!

Project_management