Moving

So we left El Paso, TX yesterday and began our long haul to Auburn, WA. I’ve subscribed to Coder Radio, Software Engineering Radio, Programming Throw-down, the Drunk Web, and the Simple Programmer Podcast and downloaded about 40 hours of podcasts to my phone for the trip. I’ll give you a review of each in a later blog post.

I also have an ASUS 10.1” Chromebook to use in hotels. I purchased it last Wednesday to help me develop while on the move as well as to test any android tablet apps that I develop. That’s because It’s actually a two in one, laptop/tablet. I haven’t tested any of my current apps on it yet, but it performs quite well in general. The keyboard is adequate (I have rather average-sized hands), and with a pretty simple tutorial I’ve been able to configure it to seamlessly run linux.

No Sprint Features to implement this week since I’ll be on the road. Before we left El Paso forever I was able to achieve the majority of last week’s planned Agile Features though. These included:

1. Creating a navbar (short)
2. Adding a brightness filter to the banner image (short)
3. Normalizing fonts and styles (short)
4. Creating the blog webpage (medium)
5. Adding Sass and mobile and tablet breakpoints (short).
6. Completing my third and final Brighter Brain interview (long).

To elaborate on my usage of long, medium, and short time estimates, they’re roughly equivalent to a day, half a day, and two hours respectively. The intent is to capture my past estimates so that I can compare them to how long they actually took to develop. As an example, I had blocked two hours to complete my final interview with Brighter Brain. In reality it took a full day, at least. This included studying relevant passages of Cracking the Coding Interview beforehand, conducting the interview itself, and reviewing the offer as well as the associated legal paperwork. From now on I’ll know better to allocate at least a half day to a ‘45 minute’ interview.

I ultimately turned down the offer from Brighter Brain (too much travel for me), but I want to say that I think it would be a great gig for anyone without any tethers. I can’t go too much into the details of the contract due to the NDA that I signed, but overall I think it’s a great growth opportunity for a single guy with no family.