In an effort to prevent missed iteration deadlines, I'm now thinking about points everyday. How many points do I have left on the board? How many points left in the week? Am I ahead or am I falling behind? Each craftsman and apprentice are to complete 2 points per day and are assigned 10 points worth of stories in a given week. Of course, my inexperience at estimating stories burdens me as I mostly underestimate stories. There are other times though where my estimate was pretty close, but unnecessary yak shaving ensued. Some stories weren't meant to be difficult, but I placed them in that category and read too much about the story topic before actually spiking out the solution. I'm hoping with enough experience and time, I will be better at estimating stories.
With that in mind, I continued working on my stories, today with the Bowling kata in Java story. Fortunately, Uncle Bob wrote a powerpoint presentation which walks you through the kata. This kata is a lot longer than the Prime Factors kata and therefore slightly more difficult. I clocked in at 15 minutes to complete the kata. At the end of the day, I picked music, and recorded the kata using Snapz Pro X and uploaded it on Vimeo. I made some typing mistakes here and there, but nothing to cry about. I'm pretty happy with it. I think I'll record the Prime Factors kata as well in the near future.
My next story is to write a jar file to will convert a Limelight styles.rb into a Java equivalent. I don't even know where to begin, so I'm going to ask Micah a lot of questions. Hopefully, he'll have time to pair and I can get an understanding of what the Java equivalent looks like, so I know where I need to go in terms of the code.
Tomorrow is going to be a busy day, with a new apprentice and a continuation of the 8LU session with Doug on DSP (digital signal processing).