Raible Designs

August Status after two weeks

It's been almost 2 weeks since I set out to make this a month to remember. My progress so far? I'm behind. I put in 60 hours in front of the computer last week and 70 this week. Here's the break down of where I spent my time:

• Current Client: 80 hours
• Raible Designs: 27 hours
• AppFuse: 7 hours
• Spring Live: 16 hours

You can see where the problem lies - in the time spent on Raible Designs stuff. This time was mostly due to fiddling with the new monitor and 17 hours on Monday trying to get Radeon DVI cards working on Linux. I guess I like thumping my head against the wall. The time I spent on Spring Live was doing editing for Chapter 6 and coding for Chapter 7. I was hoping to have Chapter 7 done by today, but that's not gonna happen - so I'll be working tomorrow and taking off Monday to try and it finish up.

My original goals for this month were to finish Spring Live and release AppFuse 1.6. For Spring Live, I still have to write 2 more Chapters after Chapter 7. That's 1 chapter next week and 1 chapter the week after. Yeah right. Chapter 6 took me the entire month of July and Chapter 7 has already taken me 2 weeks. I'm still hopeful I can come close to pulling it off. The problem is that I never account for editing - and that seems to take a few hours per week once I've turned a chapter in. Worst case, Spring Live 1.0 will be released in late September. This might happen anyways since the editing for the ERP took 3 weeks and I'd like to fix all the issues found in the first 5 chapters. Fixing issues will probably take a day since I need to setup JIRA, enter all the issues, and then proceed to make sure they're fixed.

As for AppFuse 1.6, I think the WebWork integration should only take a couple of days. But that's 2 solid days. The other big issues involve a lot of XDoclet hacking and modifying, so that's probably another day there. Give it another day for various other bugs and one more for documentation updates/tutorial writing - and I'm up to 5 days. Yet this is still possible too. My current contract is scheduled to end when the baby is born, but I think I'm going to end it on Friday, August 27th. This gives me the next week to work on AppFuse - if the baby doesn't come. The baby is due on Friday, September 3rd.

The interesting thing about this week over the last was it was a coding week for Spring Live. When I write code, I prefer to have no deadlines - so I do it at night. If I did it in the morning, I'd have to quit coding around 8 and start my day job. By doing it at night, I'm pretty much giving myself the whole night to get stuff done. I've gone to bed b/w 3 and 4 every night this week. My problem is that I then sleep in until 9 or so. When I write, I find it's easier to get up in the morning, with a clear head and go to it. It's going to be tough making the transition from going to bed at 4 to getting up at 4. The good news is that I'm not just letting my body go to shit like like last time, I've actually been exercising. I feel great, but my fingers are starting to cramp from typing so much.

NOTE: If Julie goes into labor anytime in the next 3 weeks, all bets are off.