Benefits of a Side Project

Just recently I started a side project with some friends of mine. Even though I thought it would be fun I needed to justify it to both my family and my self. Here are the reasons that I came up with for it being a good idea.

Learn New Technology - I am doing the project in groovy and grails and although these are not new to me, I have not been able to put the time into them that I would like. Also when you have to tackle real problems it can really boost your learning on the platform.

Practice what you Preach - On my "Paid" projects I am always telling the people I work with alternate approaches and processes that we could use to improve our productivity. The side project gives me a chance to put my money where my mouth is. I will be able to work on Acceptance Test Driven Development, Kanban, UX design, Personnas, Story Maps and other things that I mention but am not allowed to use in my day to day work. This way I can refine what I say and come up with some real world examples of why and how they work.

New Tools - This new project is allowing me to try some tools I don't use at my current project. Some of these are:

• Developing on my Mac Book Pro
• Setting up and using a Linux Server
• Using AgileZen as a story/kanban board for a distributed team
• Easy-B for ATDD
• WebDriver2/Selenium for front-end testing
• Hudson for my CI server

Experimentation - One of the big experiments I want to try on this project are functional branching and Continuous Deployment. These are things I have been trying to get worked into my current environment but there are just to many things I haven't wrapped my head around to be able to pitch it to a large scale corporate environment.

Just Fun - The last item is that I just think it would be fun to work with these tools and processes and people on this application. Plus when it is all said and done, I will hopefully have a better tool to enter information about my workouts in, and be able to get some good reporting on my progress. I also hope that I will be able use this application as a back-end for an iPhone and/or an Android front-end also.

Well that is my story of why I signed up for this and I am sticking to it. Hopefully later on I will be able to write some good posts about some of the tools I worked with here and some good lessons learned.

Squat Ladder

, baYesterday I was able to do one of the Crossfit benchmark workouts. It was the squat ladder. The way it works is you do one squat the first minute, then two the second and so on, until you don't complete your amount in the minute. At that point you continue on starting back at one. You do this for 30 minutes and your first 10 minutes are overhead squats the second ten minutes are front squats and the last 10 minutes are back squats, the weight I used was a 45 pound bar.

When I first saw this I thought it would be no problem, I can do thirty squats in minute, but when you add it up, it is 465 squats if you get them all. Needless to say I was wrong, I was able to get to the round of 17 squats before I missed, I finished these up and started back at one and did not miss again for the rest of the work out. I ended up doing 244 squats. My legs are killing me today. Next time I hope to get to the 20 minute mark.