Type Slowly

Day(s) log, 23rd-26th Oct

I haven’t got around to writing a day log for each day between friday and now, but here’s the gist of what I’ve been up to:

For Harmonypark, I’ve been working on some last-minute changes to Thrive’s authorization logic before we launch. At this point, we haven’t really got time to do things as neatly as I’d normally like, so I’m really just doing whatever’s quickest to get the features passing, and am planning to refactor it once we have more time. In this situation more than ever, I’m really thankful for automated regression and acceptance tests- even though the solution I’m working on isn’t optimal in my terms, the tests do at least give me confidence that it’s fit for purpose.

Alongside that, I’ve nearly done my final Java programming coursework - to produce a visualisation of the mandelbrot set, which is providing an outlet for my unbounded appetite for abstraction, since I’ve had to surpress it at work for the moment. It consists of a class representing the mandelbrot set itself, another that acts as a generalised viewer for any arbitrary set of points in cartesian space, and an interface that represents a strategy for colouring points in the plane, based on a third dimension of information.

The trouble with it, though, is that it renders a very pretty pattern that doesn’t look much like the Mandelbrot set. I’m not yet sure why this is, but I’m hoping to get it sorted tomorrow.

I’ve also been reading more of my statistics book, which so far I’m very impressed with. It introduces every topic, starting with elementary probability with a lot of mathematical rigour, as well as providing useful real-world examples. Highly recommended. 

Tomorrow I’ll be going to school for an Architecture and Hardware lecture, then on to work for a final push on Thrive before we launch it. I’m hoping to sort out this Mandelbrot set thing once and for all too!