Getting stuck into a new project

• I’ve recently switched project at work. This week feels like the week I’ve got properly stuck into it. I’ve been able to deliver some substantial feature work, whereas my previous changes have been technical in nature or small pieces of work.

• The build is frustratingly slow, and Blazor hot reloading doesn’t work well so there’s a lot of time spent waiting for builds when I’m working with the UI code. I’ve found it has been a good opportunity to review small PRs one file at a time while waiting for builds. I don't think it's a suitable strategy for reviewing large PRs, but it helps keep on top of smaller ones.

• I’m impressed by the team’s attitude to receiving comments on PRs. This has been true on every project I’ve worked on at my current company, but I’m still impressed every time I work with a new team how receptive people are to receiving feedback on their code. I've also seen people learn things from a comment on one of their PRs, then pass that knowledge on to others on their PRs.

• The project uses wrappers around the UI components we’re using, but not all events from the component library are exposed through the wrapper. I lost a good chunk of time trying to work around the lack of a blur event on a specific input before I realised that the base component does in fact have a blur event. Once I realised that I was able to update the wrapper to expose the event, then I could use it as I originally wanted to. The lesson for me was to (pretty much) ignore the events exposed by the wrapper, and go straight to the base component next time I want to know what’s available.

Working from home

• Despite my best efforts, my home office got too hot for me to be productive. I was able to work elsewhere though, and was productive in my dining room which was much cooler. I also spent a stint sat in the shade outside. I didn’t take my peripherals out there so didn’t do any coding, but was able to review some PRs there.

• I had to collect my daughter from nursery and take her to the GP which was a definite disruption to my professional productivity. I was glad of the extra time with my daughter though and we had a lot of fun in the waiting room at the doctor’s surgery.