A Disappointing Return

Today was my last day working from home, sadly. It's been really nice to get to work from home, and I've taken full advantage of it in every way. My productivity was up, as well as my level of relaxation. I was able to spend my breaks and lunches with my family in the comfort of my home and pet my dog while I worked. If it were up to me, I would work from home all the time, but unfortunately, that decision is out of my hands. My state was one of the last to issue stay-at-home orders and one of the first to rescind those orders. I think they value the economy over the lives of their citizens, but that's a much deeper discussion. As it stands, though, Florida has over 33,000 cases of Coronavirus, and it doesn't seem like we've even hit our peak, yet. Sending people back to work at this point seems dangerous, but I will be taking every precaution I can. I will be wearing a mask while at work and keeping my distance from everyone else at the office. I'm not very concerned about getting sick myself, although I'm sure it's not pleasant; I just don't want to bring it home to my daughter who isn't even 2 yet. Anyways, I'm not excited to be returning back to the office, but I will make the best of it.

I was really hoping to get started on the React Native project, but again it did not happen. We were just about to start a video call to go over everything when one of our other team members contacted us. She had just shown the payments application version to the executives and had a list of changes to make to it. It's always right at the end of the day that this happens; she called us up at about 3:15 and the list of changes was a page and a half long. Most of the changes were pretty superficial, but there was one glaring issue. When the application is deployed live, some PHP is added that has some implied styles from a Bootstrap layout. For the most part, this doesn't cause any issues, but every once in a while it really throws a wrench in things. Unfortunately, the wrench this time was the entire check component, which is the whole reason for the version. When she pulled it up on the stream, the entire check was janky. The height was all messed up and the padding and margins were all off. The worst part is, when working on it locally, these changes are not reflected. I accessed the dev deployment and tapped into the dev tools for Chrome to change some things around to get the correct result. I was able to get it almost all the way there before time ran out for the day, but it's all wrong on the local server now. It's really difficult to develop like this, when the result you see in the local server isn't the same you'll see live, and it kind of bothers me. This is supposed to deploy live at 9 AM on Monday, so I'm hoping we can get it all the way set up by then.

Until then, I spent the rest of the day working on the next version of the payments application. After the big changes I made to the structure of the global state, it opened up some possibilities for other things we could do with the application. We have a bar at the top that keeps track of what step you're on, but the older versions only show the last 3 steps, which were really the only ones accessible on the global state until yesterday. I was able to add on to this step indicator to keep track of all of the steps now, but I really don't like the way I'm going about it right now. What I need is another piece of global state that keeps track of what steps have been completed so far. I envision an array of steps that is pushed to every time a new step is completed. If the user goes back, that step could be filtered off of the array. I thought I could do it without creating this state, and I did, but it was so messy. I basically had ternarys all over the place checking for different pieces of state and the active step that comes from the props of the component. It's just not ideal, and I would pity anyone that had to work on this component after I got done with it. I think it could be handled pretty cleanly by adding this array of steps completed, but it does add a little complexity to the rest of the application. Still, I think it's pretty nice to have this step indicator on every step.