With the third week done, we are now in the latter middle of this phase, and with that comes stress, deadlines, but also important lessons. Let’s analyze this last week’s events.

If I had to summarize this week in 2 words, it would be these: Angular and organization. Let’s start with the latter. Although time wasn’t as much as an issue with the progress I had already made, the nagging sense that somehow things wouldn’t work out as I had planned wouldn’t go away, so before diving into the assigned tasks, I needed to organize myself. Some hopeful reference came from the idea of Getting things done, which focuses on quickly organizing tasks into different categories bases on how approachable they are, and according to which bin they fall into, taking the necessary actions, discarding them even if appropriate. With that in mind, I decided to push back my reading of The mythical Man Month book, as this was the least time dependent task I had and I’m fairly confident I can tackle it with some long sessions of focused reading. My second order of action was the open-source contribution, which while it wasn’t the most urgent, I knew things could spiral out of control if I didn’t find a suitable repo with a reasonable window of time to work on its issue. Learning from last week’s lesson, I procured that before jumping into trying to solve the issue I was able to set up a proper development environment. Right now, I’ve been successful at setting up the environment and finding some suitable issues on the Material UI repo, and with that I could safely jump into the most urgent task: the workshop.

With the workshop comes the second theme of this week, which is Angular. As discussed in last week’s essay, I’ve decided to give a workshop regarding pipes in Angular. At this point I still don’t feel comfortable with the Angular framework, but at the very least I’m starting to be able to work on it, even if slowly, to make the apps I need. In order to prepare for the workshop, I spent a couple of days working on an Angular course, in which I developed a handful of simple apps, one of which was a (cheat sheet)[https://github.com/Al-0/angular_tests/tree/main/pipes] of some of the most common pipes. This resource helped me immensely in understanding the fundamentals of pipes uin Angular, including arguments, safe URL handling, as well as custom pipes. Another interesting rabbit hole I’ve dived into in order to prepare the workshop is that of pure vs impure pipes, which explains the performance stats of running pipes. Out of curiosity, I also searched for something similar to pipes in the other popular frameworks, what I found is that React doesn’t have them, as it only accepts pure JS in its interpolation: and Vue used to have them, but they were discontinued in version 3.

On a final note, the last lesson from this week came from the fact that preparing a workshop is more difficult than I expected, since it wasn’t until I started preparing the environment, exercises and presentation that I realized how much thought must go into the way we present the information we want to share as to make it as easy to understand as possible. At the moment of writing this, the ideas and structure of that will be exposed in the workshop are in place, and I’m determined to finish as soon as possible all the material I need in order to present on Wednesday. With that, I should be able to work on the open-source issue and have plenty of time to finish the book. I’ll do my best to keep myself organized and accountable.

Let’s hope for a successful and eventful end of phase, cheers!

Workshop