It's gotten busy at work.

I mean... BUSY.

For a few months there I didn't have much to do. Mostly bug fixes here and there. And then we had a new project start and I was given the Bootstrap/UI duties for that team. And then a second project spun up, and it was decided I could be a "shared resource", and I was given the Bootstrap/UI duties for that project.

And then third project came about.

And a fourth.

Currently, I am on five scrum teams. Yes. Five. Now, I don't always have work or bugs for all teams at any given time, but there are days when I'm heads down for a solid 8-10 hours.

It shouldn't (hopefully) be for long. If it is, I'll burn out. Thankfully I have a good scrum master who's always checking my point totals and making sure I'm not going batshit crazy. Two sprints ago I was given a total of 13 points. A full sprint's effort is typically 8. That was a crazy week.

But hey, at least I'm not bored.

I'm not a fan of the "Open Office" concept.

I get that it's supposed to foster creativity and collaboration. That productivity is supposed to increase. A worker in an open office is more approachable and communication increases.

Perhaps that's all true. Personally, I don't buy into it. I think rather than fostering collaboration it's fomenting animosity towards fellow co-workers. Case in point: my desk is maybe 4' x 2'. I have a side divider that's probably 16" inches tall, and a divider on the back of my desk that's maybe 2, 2 1/2 feet. Before I switched from sitting on the left side of my desk to the right, I was literally about a foot away from my co-worker (thankfully, no one sits to my right). The person who sit across from me is at least 6'2" and likes to stretch his legs out under the desk. I don't blame him at all. We end up kicking each other a lot, as I like to do the same.

There's a plethora of JavaScript books available for those who learn best by reading. Every single book I've picked up over the years (and I'm embarrassed to say how many I have that I've only picked through), has started with "The History of JavaScript", to some degree.

This annoys me.. I really don't care about the history. Does a mechanic open a manual on how to fix an engine and the first chapter is "The history of the internal combustion engine"? While I haven't checked any manuals lately, I would bet not. So why does it seem every JavaScript book needs to delve into the history of the language? The syntax and structure of JavaScript is nothing like it was back in 1995, much like a modern engine only slightly resembles an engine from 100 years ago. Maybe that's a bad analogy, as they're still using combustion to force pistons to turn a crankshaft to power a drivetrain (man, why hasn't the engine developed past that?), but you get the idea. I want to get to the practicality of the language, I don't believe I need to know it was originally called Mocha, then Livescript then blah blah blah.

In a previous post , I mentioned that I had installed Ghost "just because". Which essentially means I can't leave well enough alone. In this case it turned out to be a good decision.

While I did like the flat-file structure of Grav, I was getting annoyed by several minor things, which added up to me deciding to just say "Screw it!", and install Ghost as my CMS of choice. The install of Ghost was a bit trickier, due to my host, but I found a good guide to get me through and within the hour, I had it setup and running. I only had six entries from my Grav install, and I had copied those to a text file previously. So it was a fairly painless process to post them in Ghost and get them tagged as I saw fit. Then I zipped up the theme I was using on my localhost (mnml, with some changes specific to me. Again, I found another how-to to accomplish that), uploaded it, and I'm happy with the result.

So far.

Hopefully, I will leave well enough alone. I'm sure I'll have some small changes here and there I want to fix, but overall, I should be good to go for the most part. Now it's time to get back to learning. Javascript will be my main focus. Or at least, should be. I did just upgrade to Bitwig 3. That's been a lot of fun to play with.

No, not the old sitcom.

In the quest to learn (insert subject here), it's important to practice a bit every day. At least for me. Some days, however, are quite the challenge for me. I want to get better at Javascript, but I find myself bouncing around topics. Three days ago I was going back through the freecodecamp.org Basic Javascript curriculum and making my way (again) through their tutorials. Yesterday, for some reason, I started watching a React tutorial on Youtube. I keep telling myself I need to learn to walk before running, but my scatterbrained self gets distracted easily. And then some days I don't want to practice coding at all and instead want to play within Logic Pro, or Ableton, or Reason.

Maybe I need to practice focusing on one particular project. Perhaps there's a YouTube video about that... oh, look, "The Office" bloopers!