A quick recap of what I worked on, fixed, or learned this week. I'm trying to keep track of small wins and new things that I pick up week to week.
Projects & Progress
- Kids Up Seasonal Site
For smaller events that don't require much management, the company wants to try a different kind of signup form. Something simple, like a Google Form. This is typical for us. The company likes to stay agile and experiment with new ideas. But from a developer’s point of view, it often means I’m building systems that get used once and then tossed away.
So this time, I’m trying something people usually frown upon: hardcoding things. I’ve added a mock signup area that simply links to the new form, and I’ve dated its visibility so it only renders for a short period. I know I’ll need to come back later to remove it, but the whole thing took ten minutes instead of hours.
- Vision up & general
I’ve been putting a lot more effort into separating any reusable logic into concerns. A year ago I probably would have just copied something twice and moved on, but after getting burned a few times I’ve started to slow down and do it properly.
Now I’ll extract it even if I’m only using it once, test it in isolation, and then plug it back into the model cleanly. I did this recently with some video embedding logic that needed to sanitize URLs and turn direct links into Vimeo or YouTube embeds behind the scenes.
It’s funny how much faster it feels once you start working this way. Just going through the process of doing things the right way builds a kind of muscle memory, and the next time around everything comes together much quicker.