Road Blocks and Flowers
Week 52 of Founding Typogram
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For the past few weeks, I have been knee-deep in challenging back-end work related to user accounts. I am more of a front-end programmer; the back-end code is not my forte. It is getting increasingly infuriating that I hadn't gotten myself out of this work already — I hoped I could wrap the back-end up in the last code sprint. On the other end, we found a bug in a public code library that we depend on, and there is no alternative to that code library. I tried to read the code and fix the bug, but it was difficult for me to understand what was going on in the unfamiliar codebase.
Needless to say, it doesn't feel good to be stuck with two major roadblocks. However, I did find two flowers along the challenging road recently.
While I was battling with code, I spent more time writing code comments and found a very nice feature of the code editor plugin I used.
My code comments follow no particular format; it is just a short paragraph explaining what the following code block is trying to achieve, in case I forget it in the future. When I was writing comments, I noticed the VS Code Tabnine plugin was guessing the words I was about to type and making those suggestions. Some of these suggestions are spot on:
I was delighted by how Tabnine works with code comments. It is a nice cool feature for coding. Because my code comment is similar to my natural writing, I could also see it being helpful for writing blog posts! I intend to try to write a newsletter next time in VS Code and see if this plugin can save time.
Another road flower is around Coding Font. Since its launch, I have gotten a lot of private messages on Twitter; some are requesting fonts they love, and some are requesting new features. I recently stumbled into a conversation with someone whose company is evaluating Retool and came across Coding Font as a unique example of using Retool for external projects. I felt inspired by our conversation and added a new feature — a progress bar to indicate how many rounds of comparison are left to reach a winner:
The feature took very little time of mine, but I felt accomplished to satisfy a user's feature request. This little win boosted my productivity!
Life is not a flat road. Startup life is even less so. It is important to find little delight while the road is bumpy and keep an eye out for the forthcoming obstacles when the road is flat.
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