Had a great Christmas/New Years break (well went back to work for 2 days in between there)!! Enjoyed the time off and just spending time with the little one and generally doing nothing productive!
I did find time during the break to spend an entire day working with @Answer7 doing a little mini hackathon! This was something that we have been toying with for a while – the basic premise is that you and a few friends lock yourself in a room for an entire day and try to create something from scratch! We spent the day coming up with the idea for and beginning to build ImGettin.It – a website where gamers can track what games they are planning to get, have already preordered, and the same for their friends they are following! The idea is pretty basic, as we wanted something we could try to rage through in a very short period of time (i.e. the hackathon idea). While we got a lot of work done in the 1 day, we didn’t scratch the surface of what we wanted to wind up actually launching. So I will continue to plug away at the site over the next week or so and hopefully have something fairly decent online after. Stay tuned! It did prove, however, that the idea for the hackathon was a success and if anything, when we do it again in the future we need to allocate MORE time and buckle down harder when raging the deliverable! This first run was a good test case though and proved that its definitely something worth doing and I recommend you give it a shot!
Watched the Creating User Experiences: Fundamental Design Principles course on PluralSight for the non-designer (myself!!). The course was very informative and I highly recommend to any developers that don’t fancy themselves a designer to check it out. Very eye opening with regard to some pretty basic fundamentals regarding design and user interaction concepts. It was a quick course, clocking in at around 4+ hours, but there’s no code involved so you can pretty much sit through it in 1 session. There were a few little exercises during but those were never longer than a few minutes at the most (and some, honestly, we just skipped altogether).
Continued work on the ImGettin.It website. Realized that the site was quickly becoming a rapid prototype disaster with regard to the code and how I was accomplishing a lot of things. So I’m going to continue to develop it to complete working order, and then rewrite the bulk of it to use proper techniques and concepts. I might even give it a shot rewriting it all in Knockout or Backbone. Hoping to have it launched within a week or 2 tops! Spent quite a bit of time wracking my brain against some EF and LINQ queries. I’m very rusty when it comes to both concepts, so this was a good crash course refresher to say the least!