That’s right: in this review I’ll be reaching all the way back to the misty, primordial ages of 2019 to fill in a missing link in the chain of reflections.
I published two Fixpoint articles, beginning my series presenting code, commentary and rationale for my draft Gales Bitcoin Wallet, covering the SQL schema Monday and starting on the Python data-wrangling part Tuesday. I took the opportunity to ingest the entire documentation of both languages into the Fixpoint reference library to head off the expected upstream decay. MP heartily endorsed the point about the advantage of a relational database for decoupling program and data and offered initial thoughts on the SQLite choice.
These articles ate up a whopping 5.9 and 8 hours each, compared to the budgeted ~2h daily, which certainly upset the remaining schedule. It doesn’t look like I communicated much about this as it was unfolding. Another problem with the plan was just being too packed; extrapolating the hours even just to five days would give a 57-hour work week.
Dropped items from the plan were #2 (Uruguay expense roundup, which I completed on the trip), arguably #6 (forum reading and interaction: I got in a good amount but probably not 3h/day), #7 (weekly review and next plan), a Wednesday article, and #9 (offline wallet dev). I also didn’t get much (any?) sleep Wednesday night prior to Thursday morning departure, but was able to make up a bit on the plane.
Packing fit a bit under the planned 3 hours and I didn’t miss anything so I figure that was fine. I got my #trilema responses out, though not by my own Monday deadline. The keksum re-genesis was fine though without a minute to spare to notice the damage to the article title.
Tuesday Diana Coman asked how I was planning to handle the work to holiday transition, outlining the three options. I took some time to record the wallet work in-flight; combined with the several existing spec and planning articles I didn’t have much trouble picking it back up in January. (More trouble on that front seems to have been with my writing and planning and generally getting back into a work mode.) She also called out my repeated not-quite-asked-questions, something I believe I’ve since kept well in mind and improved at including in conversations with others. On Wednesday I had some seriously optimistic ideas about how available I’d be over the holiday, which she adjusted to a more realistic level (except that even the “I’ll at least try to read logs” didn’t end up doing much).