5 questions from @elainegrey

[sonia]

Thanks for the questions, elainegrey! Still willing to write questions if people want them, although it might take me a while to get to it.

1. Assuming you work in some agile derived methodology, what do you look for in a good sized story to work on? If not, what makes an attractive coding task for you?

Yes, I'm working in an Agile shop, but it hadn't occurred to me to choose a story based on size. Mostly the product manager and I set priorities together for the two-week sprint, and then I work on whatever story has clearest next steps at the moment. If something is small I'll get it all done, and if something is large I might spin off sub-stories.

I don't like it when the product manager breaks up stories before they're actively in development, because often he gets the fracture lines wrong, or we change directions and there are a bunch of semi-irrelevant stories floating around, or I want to gather ideas and notes about the project in one place but no one story is central anymore.

2. Have you worked on code somewhere where subject knowledge is a significant component of the work as well as coding knowledge?

Well, I'm sure learning a lot about the rules of finance, accounting, and calculating tax at the moment! I haven't worked at a place where I had to have detailed knowledge of the topic before I started, but there's always knowledge about the domain on top of the programming itself.

3. Do you like working with data structures more or do you think of objects and their actions more or do you think more about REST principles? (Or do you work in a different area of coding altogether?)

I think of programming very spatially. So, objects as actual things with actual boundaries between them, and data being jealously guarded inside one of them so another one has to send a polite message to find out about it.

What would thinking about REST principles look like? Somewhere along the way REST became this big keyword. It's just GET and POST requests, right?

If "eh, work, no" comes to mind, substitute "What is your favorite plant to smell, vegetable eat, and fruit to include in cooking?"

Bonus question! I'm really enjoying smelling sun-warmed eucalyptus as I bike in the hills here, even though it is invasive and highly flammable. Favorite vegetable varies by season and preparation. Currently enjoying Japanese sweet potato. I include carrots and kale year-round, so they might count as favorite by frequency. Sometimes I toss apricots or figs in with my cooking, but not often.

4. Are there things you have been surprised you have a chemical sensitivity to?

The thing that surprises other people the most is essential oils. "But they're pure and organic!" Yup, and my body freaks out anyway. I've been disappointed by reacting to the rubber in bike clothing, like the grippers around the bottom of bike tights. Or maybe they had some kind of anti-microbial treatment. Anyway after multiple washings and a long time of letting them sit and air out, I got rid of them.

5. Do you have a sense of the whole dance in your head or is it a chain of memories, movement one to movement two? If you have a sense of the whole dance, that's alien to me, and could you describe what a that's like? If it's movement one transitions to movement two, what movements and transitions particularly delight you?

I teach dances, and I like to give people an overview. "It has three parts, and the third part is faster. This is the most complicated bit, and the rest is straightforward." It's like knowing a whole route from point A to point B, or a whole song. It helps to be familiar with the music, and the movements are often choreographed to the music. I love places in dances where there's a hold, stillness, partly because it's so surprising. I also like dances whose movements flow well, so I can relax into them.

Comments

[redbird]

4. I'm not at all surprised about the essential oils, given that the whole point is that they concentrate part of the plant in question.

That's in addition to the part where yes, it's natural*. So are ragweed, nuts, and fish, to say nothing of poison ivy.

*sort of natural, the way flour or tofu is natural, not the way just-harvested grains of wheat soybeans are.

[sonia]

Good points!

[elainegrey]

When the purists are the advocates, REST is very strict about the resources the verbs affect. So before we had APIs that were "this user places a hold on this book" and i would have thought of URL paths as users/[user id]/holds to see the user's holds or books/[book id]/holds to see the books hold. Instead, one has holds/ and search for the user or search for the book to get the list of holds. So instead of a book object or patron object with hold attributes, holds are now their own resource. That might not have been the best example -- there are other attributes of users that are now off in their own resource because they are managed differently.

Maybe that's obvious to a software engineer, but it's been a mental shift for me.

[sonia]

Interesting! That sounds like it reflects database design to me. I wonder if there's a whole layer about RESTful design that I'm missing completely, or if it's covered by other concepts I know about the way I've been assuming.