With almost two months of working on this big project for Zao, it has been great to know that I always have at least a full day of work to tackle. Dedicating 20 hours a week to that work has allowed me to be pickier about the other projects I take on and spend less time dealing with finding potential projects. Although, at some point in a few months, I am going to want to make sure I have enough work lined up. Most of the other developers on the project were actually away this week, which left me feeling a little lonely. I have really enjoyed knowing that I am working within a team of people all trying to build something awesome together, and having other people to get feedback from is invaluable to growth as a developer.
I had my Gutenberg block (that I have been working on for a couple weeks) at a good spot where I wanted to review with other developers, so I moved onto creating a new simpler block that shows a random article from a custom post type. It was refreshing to work on a block that has less moving pieces, and I could make significant progress in hours instead of days.
This week, I kicked off work on a big update to a product page for ISSofBC. The bulk of the project is going to be handled by Matt Lewczuk, who I am working with for the first time. This project is a lot of copy/paste and repetitive WooCommerce product configuration. I didn’t come up with the current product set up, but until we overhaul how their whole product selection logic works we are going to keep updating what they have. Matt and I had a great meeting to review the current product, the spreadsheet of changes the client wants, and how the system works. I haven’t had someone working for me on a project in a few years, but it’s kinda nice to be running a project and having someone else do my bidding. So far he has been very responsive and quick to pick up on new things, so I’m looking forward to him building things out over the next few weeks.