It's been another tiring week, but I felt it went by fairly quickly.
Tiring because I did about ten hours of driving this week to my new contract. It's in Lowestoft and it takes me about an hour and 10 mins each way. I will only have to do this for a couple of weeks - after that, I will work remotely three days a week.
What went well
Work
Made some progress with my freelance project - the online shop - but not as much as I'd hoped to get done - but with the driving to and from work, it hasn't left me with much spare time to work on this.
But I have managed to iron out some bugs and find a few more. I'm now at the final stage of the customer flow through the checkout process. Just need to get the system to successfully place an order and then I can start working on the front-end code and design.
Even though I didn't manage to get much coding or design done, I did manage to sketch out some wireframes for the layouts and I also sketched the flows for the user journeys. Good old pen and paper!
Personal
All the new carpet has been laid upstairs now. My wife also took this opportunity to sort through the kids' toys, clothes and books Marie Kondo style. Glad to say this is also over. I also finished sorting out the new vivarium for our tortoise - a huge six by four-foot box now sits in our living room (we have a few pets!).
Had to rush around the day before the carpet was being laid down on the upstairs hallway to get some network cable under the floorboards from the airing cupboard for me to wire in a Ubiquiti wifi access point, that will be mounted on the ceiling. Bit of a challenge - most of the rectangular floorboards had already been cut by electricians, but I needed to get the network cable to go under a floorboard that wasn't cut. I cut a hole in the airing cupboard floor, used a metal wire, looped over a water pipe to slide along until the gap where the floorboard had been lifted and then I could pull the network cable through!
Writting
I also managed to get a blog post out but it wasn't web design related, I wrote about my ventures into home automation - but I don't think this was well received. I need to get back into writting more about web design stuff and less personal.
What didn't go well
Work
So I had my first week at my new job and it wasn't what I expected. I basically didn't do any work the entire week.
As a contractor, I'm used to arriving at a new job and having work to do. Even if I came in at the beginning of a project, which is the ideal time to start a new contract but not always possible, there is still project work to do, even if it's not coding.
But what I've been doing was labelled as training. So I spent all week reviewing existing code - seeing how the front-end code works with the backend, their templating language and use of variables. Also learning about all the different websites, environments and processes.
I'm told next week I'll be working on bug fixes until the project work can start - this is not ideal, but its better than training. I'm hoping this won't last more than a week and it helps me gain useful knowledge about the sites I will be working on when the project does start.
It's been hard getting used to working on a windows machine again after a very long time - at my last contract, I think I lasted a month before I switched to working on my Linux laptop, but I won't be able to do that here.
Until next week
I'm hoping next week I will be able to get more work done on the online shop project as I get more used to the daily driving and actually get stuck into the front-end code and design work of the project.