It’s a little scary how much you can do with focused days of hacking.

After waking up early and revising some documents of understanding, I started working on a Ruby on Rails prototype for one of my projects so that I could get a better handle on how much time it would take me to implement the client’s requested features. When I decided to stop for dinner (or really, the cats decided for me), I found myself shaking – low temperatures, low blood sugar, perhaps both. Easily fixed, although I really should get back into the habit of walking around and nibbling on healthy snacks throughout the day.

I’ll look into making my regular breaks more intrusive so that I actually remember to take them. Ah, that’s right; fresh install of Linux, no Workrave set up yet. It’s hard to resist the pull of flow, but I need to if I’m going to develop other skills and enjoy life.

It’s so much fun to plunge back into fluency, though. I haven’t done Ruby on Rails since 2007. I skimmed a Rails book during one long commute and then hit the ground running. It’s easy to get back into the language, the platform. It helps that I do a lot of Emacs Lisp – lists and macros make me happy.

I’ve built some of the core features of the site, and I’m excited about the next components I’m going to work on. I should keep detailed task logs so that I can use that for estimates in the future. It’ll be useful. I’m tempted to adjust my current estimates downwards, but I shouldn’t – I need to leave space for things that might come up. (Or go down.)

What can I do to make tomorrow better? There’s a meeting, so that will be good non-coding time. I’ll try to stick to that take-a-quick-break-every-hour thing, too.

Extra time spent working is usually time pulled away from things I should also pay attention to, like my upcoming presentations, so I should block off more non-coding time tomorrow and this weekend. Maybe tomorrow afternoon I can walk to the bank and set up my investing TFSA. I’ve actually worked close to 40 hours already and it’s only Thursday, so I should probably scale back tomorrow.

Tempo’s still a little too fast. I’ll post this and tidy up. If I’m still buzzing after I tidy up, I might go to bed early. Or I might play the simplified Pachelbel’s Canon on the piano for a bit – that’s great for slowing down.

2011-02-10 Thu 19:07