hacker-school-thursday-june-26th-2014
On Thursday I gave my first presentation. This was great, because the desire to prepare increased my drive. Also, it was good practice. I was ridiculously nervous.
I focused well during the early part of the day, and then did some review with Allison. Allison's feedback helped me understand which parts of the design required motivation, so I made that the focus of my presentation. I used this draft of notes as make-shift slides. Unfortunately, I ran out of time, and didn't get to my demo at all! And even so, I didn't touch on everything in the design. Next time I'll book ten minutes, instead of seven.
Allison also helped me with my code. We found some places where I could run into unexpected errors, and she introduced me to context managers to handle those cases. Then she taught me how to write my own Exception class. Not only was that something I had been wanting to learn, it was a great improvement. I was sorry when the time was up.
Check-in
Plan
- Prepare for demo by finishing Boolean parsing.
Actual
- Noticed a problem with names being not human readable when the files that match a tag are listed. To solve this, I made an index by storing the text of the pathnames in files named by the file id in a special directory called truenames. That solution is simpler than the others I considered, but has an undesirable consequence that I haven't fixed yet: it isn't updated when files in the original filesystem are moved. I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm going to need some garbage collection and repair routines, and how that would work.
- Got feedback and code review from Allison, as described above.
- Watched all the other fantastic presentations.
- Fixed up some of the code based on the review session.