I had a little guest while grabbing some coffee this morning.
I finished reading The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey. Not quite what I was expecting from the authors of The Expanse novels. Certainly a unique story, but it wasn’t much of a page turner for me. 📚
A minor update to the Bothy theme this morning. I’m not going to lie, this is a pretty selfish update. I fixed the theme’s layout to allow additional CSS tweaks. Now I can put up Christmas lights again!
We watched Superman tonight. It’s been a while since we really enjoyed a superhero movie. I hope there are more movies to come from DC.🍿
We put the Christmas tree up this weekend, as next weekend was going to be a bit busy. Outdoor lights go up tomorrow.
I caved and bought Marked 2 to preview my Markdown files as I write them in my text editor. It feels like 2015 again.
Using the daily plan bar again
For the last few weeks, I’ve been using Mike Rohde’s daily plan bar for my work notebook.
Initially, I started using a weekly plan bar over a year ago. Still, in the last few weeks, I’ve needed to tie my notes to that same day, so I’ve started using the daily plan bar again.
Nothing fancy, just a bar representing my day, split into 15-minute segments going from my usual hours of 8 to 5. If I am starting earlier in the day, it can go from 7 to 4 instead.
My daily plan bar is always on the left-hand side of the left-hand page of my notebook. The rest of the two-page spread is for notes and anything else that comes up that day.
It’s been a good change moving to the daily plan bar. Scoping out my day is much easier, and adding last-minute meetings and changes is easy.
In the future, I may reduce the bar to just eight hours and use the extra space for a single goal for the day.
A good range session tonight for Drew. The driver is still looking good despite not playing much golf. Hopefully the weather stays dry enough for some golf at the weekend.
Jen and I finished season 3 of The Diplomat last night. Seasons 1 and 2 were great, but it definitely tailed off for us in season 3.
Making do with plain text files
After my recent decision to scale back on GitHub issues and pull requests, I’ve found some traction again with plain-text files.
In a couple of Rails applications, I have a docs folder where I store several Markdown documents that serve as guides for some of the code. To this, I have added three files, FEATURES.md, BUGS.md and PLANNING.md. The features and bug files are self-explanatory, but the planning file might need some explanation.
GitHub has a feature called milestones that lets you set an end date for a milestone. You can also add issues to a milestone. I always thought it was a nice feature that mimicked a sprint from agile methodologies like Scrum.
The planning file contains the sprints I have set out for the next six months, with each sprint listing the planned features and bugs I will work on. It gives a nice top-level view of what’s ahead and is easy to update.
I’m still in the early days of this plain-text switch from GitHub’s own features, but I’m already seeing benefits. The files live in the application’s codebase, so updating them is easy in a text editor. Having these files in the code base reduces the amount of context switching I need to do. Features and bugs can be planned in one pane, with any related code being open in a neighbouring pane, side by side.
Finally, the files are plain text, so they can be manipulated by any scripts. I am considering an auto-generated HTML file that provides an overview of the project’s status. It would include the number of open issues, a roadmap for the next few sprints, and any open bugs.
The planning tools that cloud-based products like GitHub and GitLab provide are fine, but are definitely overkill for what I need. Making do with plain text files isn’t a step down; it’s just an easier way for me to manage these projects with minimal overhead.