As one of those individuals who might have a knack for it (but not a love for it - I am passionate about finding solutions to technical problems; coding is one of the tools that I use), I have found one thing that has served me well, especially after too many of those 15 hour stints in a row (or longer), is having a process under your fingers that you can just run on autopilot to help with the little things.
On a recent ETL project I was on, there were a few deadline-induced long days, especially when getting through a lot of the cleansing tickets (this was over a century of data, 20-25 years in digital form, from various sources and states of cleanliness), this was the process:
- Take the next ticket in the queue
- Find a representative dataset that reproduces it
- Incorporate the representative dataset into a test
- Ensure the test fails
- commit test
- Fix until all tests pass
- commit code
- refactor if needed, ensuring all tests pass
- If a new bug is found while fixing what you are currently working on, log a ticket
- compare the results of your cleanup process to the previous run. If necessary, fix your test and refine your implementation (or log a bug). This was very important when trying to ensure that there were no cleanup changes to the dataset beyond what you intended. A temporary Git repo + git diff... can work well with a specific type of data.
- commit code with a tag to indicate that it is ready to test for deployment
- Repeat
The mechanics start to become automatic, and the limited caffeine-fueled brain cells that are left functioning can focus on the important aspects. And do not take this as a suggestion that being in that mental state is good, recommended, or a prudent practice. Sometimes it happens.
Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
Please read these before you post! —
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
- a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
| |
For: |
|
Use: |
| & | | & |
| < | | < |
| > | | > |
| [ | | [ |
| ] | | ] |
Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.