My favourite week of the quarter! Why? Five glorious days of learning ,of exploration, innovation, and problem-solving.
What adds an extra sparkle to this already wonderful week? Not a single scheduled meeting. Don’t mistake it for a week of leisure though. I still spent a proper 8 hours on my laptop, and on occasion little longer because I’d be fuelled by sudden surges of inspiration. Remember how hectic my last week was? Strip out all the pressure of deadlines and meetings and viola, you get hack week.
Now, I’ll confess this isn’t my most recent week. Hack week happened roughly 4 weeks ago give or take. The ensuing three weeks however, happened as a marathon of sorts. Tight deadlines on a huge feature. Two 4 day work weeks and unforseen personal bad news that left me reeling. However, I made a commitment to chronicle my journey, so I’ll pick up from where I left off.
We dub it Fix Hack Learn (FHL week) at work but hack week has a certain mystique to it. This quarter’s hack week, I decided to get out of my comfort zone and actually build something. Or rather, improve an application my team and I have been working on. Specifics are still shrouded in secrecy lest I risk the ire of my employer. However, I can say this, I added a new feature to our app and got to demo it to my entire team! Previous hack weeks have seen me as part of a larger group working on something, but this year, I dared to tread that path solo. Lo and behold it paid off with wider visibility across the entire team.
I got down and dirty with React states. A React state is like a container where a React component keeps track of information that it needs to remember. Imagine you’re playing a game and you need to keep track of your score. The React state is where you’d keep that score. So, whenever you score a point, you update the state to reflect the new score. I won’t get too technical, but my week in improving our app, I worked on manipulating data and properly rendering it in the UI. Enough of technical talk lest I bore you to sleep.
My recipes this week:
Pan seared steak with broccoli
My own recipe of chicken salad
Book I’ve been reading: The island of sea women by Lisa See
