Week 364 was my last working week of 2019.

I spent one last day on Willsneck, cranking through snaglists from the designer and content strategist. We got to where we wanted to be at the end of the day, after a lot of tweaking and polishing.

I didn’t really spend any time on Mayhill - too busy with clients this week.

I added one final edit to one of the Longridge courses, which had me wracking my brains for ages to find the right thing to drop in. But: I did, and it’s in, and I’m happy with the choice I made there.

Most notably, I kicked off Hallin. It’s really nice to be writing Ruby after so long away, and to be working against a nice, well-laid out codebase. It’s not a small codebase by any means - all monolithic Rails apps of a certain size have their own quirks of patterns, after all - but the choices and trade-offs made in it are all pretty understandable, and it didn’t take me too long to fit into the house style. Good to have a comprehensive test suite, too: it’s encouraged me to keep adding to it generously, and has caught several regressions I might otherwise have missed. The state of automated browser-based testing these days always impresses me. Testing interaction flows with Capybara and headless Chrome as part of our regular test suite is a delight. Tests are written from the perspective of the user - go here, click on this, and you should see that - and they work fast enough that they can be run regularly. Of course, this type of testing has been pretty standard for a good while now, but having been away from large web applications for a few months, it’s nice to return to them and be reminded of both the performance and impact of automated acceptance testing.

It looks like by the time I’m about halfway through the work - early next year - I’ll have an end-to-end demo of everything in the statement of work. That’s good. I like getting to end-to-end as fast as possible. It doesn’t meant that I’m going to finish earlier. Rather, it means I get at least one more pass at the whole piece of work, having explored the depths and edges of the problem. Unknown unknowns rear their heads faster when you can see the entire workflow laid out.

It also means that I’ll have learned enough about the real problem, which enables me to make an informed second pass. My first pass, which I’ve nearly wrapped up, is a highly literal interpretation of the brief. It achieves the tasks and pass the tests, but that’s about it. There is room for polish, and also room to refine the brief based on what we now know. So we’ll look at how well everything works, what assumptions I’ve made that are incorrect, and what assumptions the brief made, and see how we can refine everything in a second pass.

That’s a job for a meeting in the first week of 2020. For now, though, that’s a cap on the year. I’ll write up a quick summary of the year’s work over the winter break, I imagine.