This has been a busy period both professionally and personally. On the professional front, we’ve been:

  • Embedding entirely new development and deployment processes within our team. This was a pretty major undertaking introducing significant change but it’s had a fantastic impact across the board. I’d say that this project was probably the highpoint of my career to date.
  • Working with the team to adapt to the new approaches, tools and mindset (while we were refining our practices and processes).
  • Balancing this activity with those projects where I’m coding and/or leading development.

On the personal front, my sons are increasingly delightful, wilful and energetic to all good things which combine in life being remarkably busy. I also celebrated my 40th birthday which led to the kind of reflection you might expect. It’s all good.

Plans for this period

During this period I wanted to take a slightly different approach to previous sprints, including:

  • Exploring a much broader range of topics.
  • Focussing less on new technologies in favour of revisiting the detail of a few things I already know (largely so that I could be surefooted when helping others get to grips with them).

I therefore left things relatively loose at the outset and decided I’d simply look at what was needed and/or interesting for my study.

Activity

General

  • Attended the Digital by Default Service Standard assessor training and joined the cross-departmental group of assessors.
  • Went along to the London Web meetup where I saw Melinda Seckington’s Un-artificial intelligence: How People Learn talk. This was pretty interesting but I was expecting less focus on artificial intelligence and more on how people learn
  • Attended a two-day Google Analytics training event.

PHP

  • Completed David Powers’ Up and running with the Standard PHP Library (SPL) course from Lynda.com in order to better understand the capabilities of this collection of classes and interfaces which have been part of PHP since 2004. It’s a good course to do a run through to especially since the documentation on SPL is shockingly sparse. The only problem is that the material is so disparate that I haven’t retained much more than a helicopter view of its capabilities.
  • Completed John Peck’s Object Oriented Programming with PHP course from Lynda.com. This was a pretty good refresher on the OO capabilities of PHP and would be very good for someone who either knows PHP but isn’t yet familiar with OO or who is familiar with OO in other languages but new to OO PHP. I’d definitely recommend it. One of the things I really like about this type of course is that you get to see how another developer would tackle a problem.

WordPress

  • Completed the WordPress for Developers LiveLessons course by John LeMasney using Professional WordPress Design and Development: 2nd Edition as a companion reference. Unfortunately, the LiveLessons course was little more than a good overview of WordPress capabilities which you could more easily get from spending a couple of hours skimming a couple of related books and the Codex. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only real way to grok the more advanced aspects of WordPress development is with hands on experience solving problems with the API.

Unix and Mac OS X

Having completed these I summarised a tiny amount of the most useful information in a couple of blog posts: one on command line essentials and another on handy text editing shortcuts for Mac.

Outcomes

There are quite a few lessons from this sprint that I’d like to take forward to future sprints:

  • I feel that this sprint lacked focus and I haven’t retained nearly as much as I had in previous sprints. To counter this I think I need to adopt two things for future Sprints:
    • Find some method for recording / sharing outline notes from the learning materials.
    • Ensure that I’m getting hands-on experience with the specific topics.
  • I also think that I would have benefited more from focussing on a smaller number of topics.
  • Three months is too long.

Plans for next sprint

I’ll be kicking the next sprint off on 1 September and, after a couple of sprints absence, will be focussing on client-side development. For now I’m going to enjoy the bank holiday weekend and take some pictures 🙂