Now that I have a decent workflow for writing, coding would be the next good thing to reintegrate into my life.

I get about an hour or two of discretionary time a day, late at night once A-‘s asleep. It’s not a solid chunk, since A- often wants to nurse, but I can usually get back to what I was doing without losing too much context. Sometimes A- takes a while to settle down, or wakes up midway. Sometimes I’m too sleepy to do much after A- goes to sleep. Still, I usually get a little time to update my journal, do some consulting, or even play video games with my husband.

How does coding fit into the picture? It’s fun. I learn stuff. Sometimes I even build tools that make my life a little easier. It gives me non-baby things to talk about with W- and other people, too.

The time needs to come from somewhere. What are the trade-offs I might make?

• Fewer drawings of non-journal thoughts, balanced by more writing time on phone. Can I figure out a good workflow for drawing on my phone? Not index cards, but maybe I can move my drawing practice to my phone for extra skill-building and mental variety.
• Less consulting, but more personal benefits to code; might also use this to expand my comfortable range for consulting
• Real-life kaizen vs virtual kaizen: shift by doing real-life kaizen while A- is awake
• Other tasks: still do as needed

What could a good setup be like?

• I spend some reading time going through documentation, Q&A, research, etc. This helps me improve my skills and work more efficiently.
• I have a dev environment set up for risk-free experimentation.
• I have a to-do list with prioritized ideas and notes.
• I work on tasks that might be 15-30m in size, ideally with tests.

I think it’ll be worth learning how to properly set things up with Vagrant. Frequent rebuilds will force me to make sure all my dev environment assumptions are documented.

It’ll also be worth cleaning up my technical notes and writing more things down, so I can get back up to speed after months or even years away.

Then I’ll want to sort out my testing environment and get back to writing tests. I wonder if I can set things up so that I can even write tests on my phone. Maybe cucumber cases? It’ll be easier to write behaviour-driven tests than regular tests, since I don’t have to mess with punctuation.

Then I can code, one small chunk at a time. Maybe I can even write pseudo code on my phone.

I’d also like to get back to tweaking my environment and tools, since that pays off multiple ways for me: enjoyment, learning, efficiency, and notes to share.

I can start by sorting out my dev environment and notes. We’ll see how that goes, or if this is something that will be mostly on the back burner until A- grows a little more. =)