Deliberate practice techniques for software developers
This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.
After several weeks of infrastructure work, it’s finally time to make the idle time feature available in the Time Tortoise UI.
This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.
A practical time tracker needs to take into account user idle time, but it isn’t possible to do that using UWP. So for the past few weeks, I have been working on a companion app that will provide the main UWP app with information, like idle time, that it can’t get on its own. The SignalR-based communication infrastructure is now done, so this week I worked on the idle time detection.
This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.
Last week, I covered the reason for using SignalR in Time Tortoise, and how SignalR can be used to build a simple chat application. This week, I’ve been working on integrating minimal SignalR functionality into the Time Tortoise codebase.
This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.
To communicate with its companion app, Time Tortoise needs to use sockets. In recent weeks, I have been experimenting with socket communication between a UWP client app and a server running in a console app. This architecture works when everything is set up and running as intended. But it can be tricky to make sockets robust. So this week I’m looking into adding a layer that makes sockets easier to use and more resistant to unexpected failures.
This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.
To build a companion app that implements functionality that a UWP app can’t, it’s necessary to pick a non-UWP technology to use. Here are a few options:
This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.
Last week, I brought up some limitations of UWP apps, including one that will affect Time Tortoise. I also suggested the idea of a companion app that could address these limitations. This week, I’ll start exploring the companion app in more detail.
This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.
I decided to use the Univeral Windows Platform for Time Tortoise because I’m targeting Windows, and because UWP is the direction that the Windows user interface is moving (as of 2017). However, I knew from the beginning that UWP would not have all of the functionality of more established options like Windows Presentation Foundation. So as I make design decisions, I also look for ways to avoid getting stuck due to UWP limitations.
This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.
Last week I covered some of the requirements for self-hosting Time Tortoise. The next step is to package and deploy a self-hosted version of the app, without disrupting the ability to run it in debug mode in Visual Studio.
This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.
As I mentioned last week, Time Tortoise is almost at the point where it could be used as a rudimentary time tracker. However, it still needs a number of improvements before I would want to use it instead of my regular time tracker.
As I’m adding features to Time Tortoise, it’s important to add them in priority order. In other words, add the most useful features first. This ensures the best use of time, and avoids throwing in features without a good reason.
This is one in a series of articles about Time Tortoise, a Universal Windows Platform app for planning and tracking your work schedule. For more on the development of this app and the ideas behind it, see my Time Tortoise category page.
Although far from done, Time Tortoise now has some basic functionality for tracking work time:
You could in theory use these features for tracking real work, but there’s a lot missing. However, before moving on to add more features, I spent some time this week on fit and finish.