Presenting

We had our weekly meeting that we have every Wednesday today. Every week, we get together, now through GoToMeeting, and go around the room to discuss what we've been working on. The human resources heads sit in, along with the executives. This is usually a good opportunity to get some feedback on the work you're doing and where you're supposed to go from there. It can be difficult to get the information I need, I have found, so I try to take advantage of this time to really get what I need. I tried to set up an individual meeting with my CTO a couple days ago and after going back and forth over emails, he ended up just calling me. I would have really liked to show him over sharing my screen what I've been working on to get some much needed feedback, but this turned out to be difficult. I had to wait until the meeting today to get any feedback about what I had been doing, and even then, it was rather vague. When I presented my new features, I opened the door for them to critique the styling or the flow of how I had set up the new form, but nobody really suggested anything of significance. I have also been asking for some guidance on where to proceed from here. I got some information from the CEO on a future project, but it's still on the boilerplate and isn't anywhere near being ready to work on.

Ideally, I will begin working on the React Native project as soon as tomorrow, but this has also proven to be difficult. There's really nothing I can do until my cohort has it set up to be able to share between the two of us. I was tasked with this project a week ago, and ever since he has been working on it. It started out with him just getting it ready so I would be able to work with it on my machine. In fact, we spent the better part of the day on Thursday last week trying to get it all set up on my machine. We ran into issues all day, and by the end of it, he had decided he wanted to take this time to turn it into a monorepo to handle both the mobile versions and the web versions all in one repository. I was ok with this at the time, and actually thought I would be able to get the code on my machine the next day and start working on it. All I really needed was some time with him to go over exactly what needed to be worked on and where everything was in the project. Well, the decision to turn it into a monorepo turned into a much bigger issue that was more extensive than we previously thought. Ever since, he's been working on getting everything in place to be able to use React Native Web alongside React Native. He's still not in a position to be able to let me get the code on my end and brief me on what's going on. I've run out of work to do on my end, so it's going to have to be done tomorrow, regardless.

As far as my work goes today, there really wasn't much left to do on the next version of the payments application. I got the feature fully functional yesterday afternoon, and it seems to be working really well. There's still a lot that will need to be done to get it hooked up to the backend, but that's not really something I can do at this point. The backend developer did speak up while I was presenting and asked a couple of questions about some of the functionality that raised some good points. Some of the products I have listed shouldn't be available given certain circumstances with the customer, so a few checks and conditionals will have to be run to account for that. However, at this time I don't get access to the information I need that comes from the customer data from the API, so the API itself will have to be tweaked before going any further. Today, I just worked on cleaning up the code. My cohort likes to keep all components for a certain page in one file, which drives me nuts but I'm going with it, and the feature I built had grown this file into over 700 lines of code. This is madness, so I had to cut it down somehow. There was a lot of logic being shared between 2 different pages, so I was able to abstract all of that into a reusable hook. This took out almost 200 lines of code and just makes everything a lot easier to read. Beyond that, I also mapped over the containers for the different boxes just to condense it a bit and created arrays of objects with the information I needed for those boxes. I'm not sure this enhances the readability of the code, but it certainly was being repeated.

Until tomorrow!