My focus right now on my ASP.NET learning is on pagination. It never occurred to me prior to two weeks ago that pagination is absolutely essential to any API. As databases grow, you want to provide ways to allow the consumer not to fetch all records at once.
I spent my entire Sunday trying to find an elegant solution for it, with no success. Some of the tutorials I watched included the programmatic formation of an URI and the code got really dense really quickly. I’ll definitely learn about the URIHelper at some point to enhance my tool box, but right now I want to keep the application lean and only having essential functionalities.
After pagination the focus will be on sorting, which can also be a bit painful and involve construction of URIs but I’m excited because I’m understanding the idea behind the code and that knowledge can never be taken away from me once it’s solid in my head.
Focusing
I have been using GitHub to help me with the “Divide and Conquer” style of attacking my projects. At any given time I’m executing some clearly defined task and at the end I push my work to Github. This routine has the double benefit of creating a back-up so I don’t repeat last weeks debacle, but also it works as a closure for that task.
When working on a complex project, it might be hard to see the end of the tunnel, so having these checkpoints serve a very important purpose to avoid the emotional ups-and-downs that can come from the frustration of being stuck. And getting stuck is very common in the life of a programmer, so it’s good to have found out a tool and a thinking model to mitigate the impact when it happens.
Oh, and using Github Desktop smoothens the process a lot and have great user interface for one to stay on top of the repository.
Tips and Tricks
I spend much more time eating than I used to. I stopped fasting for a week now and entered a bulking phase. I’ll write about that later. But now when I eat I’ve been watching videos with tips and tricks for the devices/apps the I use the most. I start with Google Calendar. There are many cool functionalities that it’s hard to find out by yourself so I’ll be posting a few every now and then.
Today’s tip is the ability to use shortcuts to change the calendar view. It might seem like a useless functionality at first but I found it very practical and I imagine people that use calendar more than me would love it.
Ok, time to sleep so I can code early tomorrow morning!