Home »

ΠWEEK: Seekagift reloaded

Antonio de la Torre profile picture

ΠWeek VII done!

The main goal for this ΠWeek was learn all about asynchronous tools that Grails offers to create dynamic web pages. To put it in context I wanted to reuse the Seekagift project that I created in ΠWeek II with Daniel Herrero and Primitivo Cachero.

Seekagift is a web tool that finds the perfect gift for a friend. You have to connect to Facebook, select a friend and the tool search in Amazon articles that fit with the ‘likes’ of your mate.

The problem that we faced that edition was that the connection with Amazon is extremely slow and the user had to wait about 20 seconds to see how the result appears in the page.

I thought that Grails async tools would be a great topic to learn, but…

Goals review

Emacs

Change from vim to emacs

Grails

Learn async capabilities in grails 2.4.4

GPars

Javascript

Compare with ajax

Seekagift

Upgrade Seekagift to grails 2.4.4
Integrate all of this in Seekagift

Deploy in public

Writing

Write post about CAS 2014

Write post about Scrum Day Oviedo

Investigate about Time Tracking for Taiga

Answer Epic topic conversation

In terms of progress and tasks done, wasn’t very well. Only achieve two of the goals.

Problems

Retake a 2 years old project was not as good idea as I thought.

  • Create a new shiny Grails 2.4.4 project
  • Migrate all the code to the new project.
  • Replace Facebook login plugin with a new and maintained one.
  • Review all Facebook permissions, accounts and API calls. Permissions most of them deprecated, and some API calls don’t work as expected or are not allowed any more.
  • Review all Amazon credentials and API calls. Creation of a new user and hard problems with the API keys to connect with Amazon Affiliates.

The time made his effect on a system with two external services and over no the best code I ever writed.

But all this work is really enough for a good retrospective:

Retrospective

Stop doing

  • Lost a lot of time and effort in an application that I’m not sure I’m going to maintain in the future.
  • Retake a very old project that I didn’t pay attention any more.

Less of

  • Focus less in ‘Working Software’ that I have to show on Friday and more in ‘Personal Innovation’.

Continue doing

  • A ΠWeek where I have to do my best.
  • Solo projects are not so bad.

More of

  • Learn knowledge that I can apply on next monday.
  • Create conversations during ΠWeek that help to achieve the goals.
  • In my Next ΠWeek-team project, I will assure that all members share the vision and the personal goals.

Start doing

  • Pivot much earlier, leaving effort in useless knowledge.
  • Prepare before ΠWeek the basic software I need.

Conclusions

I’m very proud of my effort, very happy that I can concentrate in the goals and very happy to feel exhausted after this ΠWeek.

See you next ΠWeek, The VIII, in July 2015!