Down the Rabbit Hole

I had a full, open day today and I spent most of it at my computer, just… reading over options. I was working on a new project idea, and got around zero lines of code written.

At first, I began with some videos by mpj.

Then, I started looking over mongoDB, and revisited some older lessons from the online course I took (over a year ago). I haven’t used it really since that time, and lost a great deal of that knowledge. So I was trying to see how much of it I could recall.

From there, I started looking into mongoose, which was new to me.

I also started thinking I needed to develop using tests, and began investigating Jasmine more – trying to see how that fared, compared to Mocha and Chai. And maybe Sinon too, for server and async stuff?

And after that, I got sucked in to looking at Express, which I haven’t worked with on a project before.

One thing led to another, which led to another. Honestly at times, it got pretty overwhelming. I guess this is considered tooling paralysis?

Eventually, I realized I was trying to do 5 new things all at the same time. And of course that would be frustrating. So I scaled things back, and tried to just get some basic code stubbed out on a page.

I don’t know if other devs do things like this, but I blew a whole day just… reading and looking, and hopping from one thing to the next. Research is good in a way. But I feel so horribly unproductive as I’ve spent a full day, and have nothing ot show for it.

[CC photo via notevenathing]

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