Home Improvement

I spend a lot of time working on my house. It's important for me to have a nice house to enjoy with my family. I also enjoy to work on new projects. I like the process of have having an idea and then seeing it through to successful completion.

I've worked on a lot of different projects over the years - first in our townhouse and now in our "forever home". I think my favourite project was my deck extension that I completed in the Summer 2020. The previous summer I got my feet wet - so to speak - and ripped out the old deck and built a small landing to test my deck building skills. This is a lesson I've learnt as I've improved my development skills. Anything can be tackled if you approach it in the right way.

You shouldn't just build something all at once from start to finish. If you do, you could be wasting a lot time. Every project can be split up into logical steps and components. I've learnt this lesson the hard way by spending hours working on some code without testing it along the way. Then when I'm "done", I try to run the code, but it doesn't work. I basically need to start over again because I have no idea how to debug it.

How to approach new projects

1. Split the project into logical steps/components - ie. create a plan
2. Focus on and build one component at a time
3. Test each component individually
4. Join each component together one at a time and test prior to adding an additional component
5. Perform a final test once all of the components have been assembled together

I've learnt that lots of testing is usually required whenever you are doing something new or working with code