The Terrain Ahead

 Pomodoro 1. 5:35 - 6:00  I should make five pomodoros today. The first one is this: a planning one. Of the remaining four, three are to be devoted to learning git and github, and one to reading Perhaps the Stars. After my first, I’ll go shopping. I have a zoom meeting for work at 10:00. Tomorrow’s going to be busy, with work, and a dental appointment in the afternoon, and a massage in the evening. So better get the shopping done today.

A broad sketch of the terrain ahead: one of my primary goals is to put my Python skills to regular use at work. One trouble there is I have two environments -- my workstation at work and my laptop -- and they don’t work exactly the same way, and transferring files between them is harder than it ought to be. If github is what I think it is, it will at least solve the file transfer problem. And if I’m going to do any serious programming, I need to have version control: the fact that I haven’t had it so far is a total embarrassment. After that, I have two ways I could go: do the first project in my Crash book, or invest some Pomodoros in actually, finally, getting competency in using the Windows command line. The fact that I’m going back to Unix someday doesn’t mean I need to tolerate being a crippled Windows user. I realize that I still have echoes of the trauma of my corporate career whenever I think about using unfamiliar operating systems. It really sucks when you don’t have enough time to do what you need to do. But I do have enough time. I realio trulio do. And I can lavish as many pomodoros on it as I need or like. The whole point of my life for the past fifteen years has been getting enough time to be able to do things efficiently. Now I’m there, and I can actually do things in the order that makes sense and gets the most done. What most impedes me right now, in putting my programming skills to work, is not the programming skills -- which are fine, and brushing them up is basically just a matter of learning a bunch of Python libraries, at this point -- but the mechanics of getting the scripts from one place to another, and deploying them efficiently on the Windows ground. This is not rocket science, and it’s not beyond my capacity. It only takes turning my full attention to it until it’s done. So -- we start with git and github.

Pomodoro 2. 6:15 - 6:40. Installed git and created a project environment So far so good :-)

Pomodoro 3. 11:08 - 11:33. Ran through typical git commands. Seems pretty straightforward, though I’m getting interference from dim memories of clearcase :-)