title: A week for personal development --- _template: blog/post.html --- pub_date: 2016-12-26 --- body: Sadly, over time, my programming time at work is becoming less frequent. Doesn’t mean I don’t do stuff it’s just little by little most my time is spent on management things. Since I don’t want to get stalled and to give myself focus into other things I got last week off to see whatever I was capable of making. To my surprise it was time well spent. > Side effect: instead of five or six days it was down to four or less cause you know, everyone is busy these days ;) So, what did I do? ## Used Lektor to build this site [This site on github](https://github.com/fmartingr/fmartingr-lektor) I finally managed to rebuild my site from scratch with [lektor](https://www.getlektor.com). Already wrote about this [in a previous post](/blog/2016/12/21/new-site/). Summary: - :arrow_up_small: Read other people's code, which is nice. - :arrow_up_small: Made some goodies with Make, Gulp and Bash to automate stuff. - :arrow_up_small: Discovered that ARM servers are ~~not so~~ fun. - :arrow_down_small: It wasn't coding. ## Natif [Natif on github](https://github.com/fmartingr/natif) Simple app to use a website as a desktop application. I wanted to do something with [electron](https://electron.atom.io) for some time now and since I use some webapps that I wanted outside of my browser this was a simple yet powerful ally for me. I wanted it mostly to create a *Netflix app* because my main browser is Firefox and Netflix isn't working on it but [I came into *trouble* when trying it out](https://github.com/fmartingr/natif/issues/1). Summary: - :arrow_up_small: Tried electron. - :arrow_up_small: Simple code, good results. - :arrow_down_small: Widevine. - :arrow_down_small: Packaging automation on release for every operating system without a decent server will force me to use jenkins, and I don't want to. ## SymbolDoc [Symboldoc on github](https://github.com/fmartingr/symboldoc) Print a simple docstring based on a given python module and a symbol name. I wanted to use [abtract syntax trees](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_syntax_tree) for something thinking it was more difficult than it really were, and it came to a simple script that print a docstring for a symbol that also could be easily integrated into my emacs setup, forcing me to document my projects more. Summary: - :arrow_up_small: Used AST! - :arrow_up_small: Made tests. - :arrow_down_small: Understanding the AST wasn't as difficult as I expected. ## Nout [Nout on github](https://github.com/fmartingr/nout) Maybe in the future a note taking app. After trying almost every note taking app out there mine are just files on a `Notes` folder written in markdown syntax. Thinking about what I needed, it came just to a couple features, so I thought that creating an index of my notes in a sqlite database would be enough. Parsing files to normalize the information and using simple queries to look up for the data. Right now I only made the file watcher and the database storage, there's a pull request on the works with some tests. It's not usable yet. Summary: - :arrow_up_small: Forgot how fun was working with multithreading. - :arrow_up_small: Getting the mindset to start bigger projects. - :arrow_up_small: Now I know that [fnmatch](https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/fnmatch.html) exists. - :arrow_down_small: Got the feeling that the components are not as modular as they should be. - :arrow_down_small: Not enough testing, solving it now. - :arrow_down_small: Not documented, but time was scarce. ## Other stuff Other things I did: - Started reading [the pragmatic programmer](https://pragprog.com/book/tpp/the-pragmatic-programmer) and started to feel that it was money really well invested. **Highly recommended to every developer out there**. (Thank you [@RusEu](https://github.com/RusEu) and [@MiguelGR](https://github.com/miguelgr)) - Made a few Pull Requests to [i3pystatus](https://github.com/enkore/i3pystatus). Minor things but it felt rewarding. - Made [a simple plugin for lektor](https://github.com/fmartingr/fmartingr-lektor/tree/master/packages/emojify). Not published yet. - Built a list of stuff to automate my laptop provisioning with Ansible even more. - Tuned a little bit more my i3 configuration. - Found out tools like codecov, scrutinizer and gemnasium. - Learn things about open source projects (guidelines, contribution, CI, ...). - Moved my site from a custom server to [Firebase](https://www.firebase.com). Things I miss: - Doing something in another programming language. Not so long ago [I tried golang](https://github.com/fmartingr/goshare) and I got the feeling that I should have invested more time in this or a new one. - Lack of documentation but you know, when there's not enough time... - Focus on unit testing more than I did. - Related with the above, should have tried to use [TDD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development) or another different development process. - Not having a boilerplate to create projects and its integrations and base file tree, spent a lot of time doing it. It's silly because you're not creating tons of projects in a short period of time but it's a task that could be automated somehow. Overall it felt really rewarding. I encourage everyone to get some time off to create new stuff, maintain your projects, create that tool you always wanted, research about that subject you read so long ago, etc. I don't know when but I will surely repeat this.