This morning I made it early enough to have some quiet time at RC. I kind of distracted myself, because I suggested going to fetch “Cronuts”, which I had heard about. The bakery seemed to be very popular among tourists, and although it was kind of nice, I didn’t really like the place. Too high prices, too much ado about nothing. The “cronut” that I tried from somebody else was tasty though. Sweet. There were different opinions whether the consistence of this round croissant was likeable or not.

The checkin was very nice in my opinion. I don’t know what we did different than yesterday, but I had the feeling that we had more help offered and requested. I should forget about the first day, it was the first day anyway and cannot count as such.

I spent some time today thinking about which job I would like to apply for and what the next step would be. I have a list of a couple of companies that I would problably like to work in. Most of the do Open Source related things. I like the thought, that I can share my work without too much thinking about NDAs. And I believe in Free Software, and having it Open Source is one step in the right direction.

In the afternoon I added a meta-feature to the starting Flask project setup: Python 2 and Python 3 support. I was curious to see what is necessary to support both. The differences in the string handling were not straightforward to handle. Also in the future, I guess it might be necessary to not use more sophisticated features of Python 3 to ensure that it still runs on Python 2.

Later towards the evening I had a discussion with David. We asked each other some questions, to see if we’re on the right track regarding our batch goals (or how to get there), for me the focus was on productivity, because of the insights from yesterday. I took away some very helpful techniques and thoughts, on how to decide for a project (e.g. by choosing one and stick to it 80% of the time) or how to not loose time on perfection (build a prototype! Other’s can add more and/or clean up) And it sometimes takes somebody to tell you these things, although you already knew them.

So I got started on a prototype with which I can collect the data that I would like to have. It’s basically just ISBNs, but I wanted to look the up during scanning, because I wanted to check if the data that was added to it via ISBNdb.com was correct. With the help of Dominic I managed to come up with a working prototype within less than two hours. And then we used the tool for a couple of more hours to actually scan all the books. Done! Wow, nice. I’m happy.