Test driven development has become an important process in the software engineering world. It allows coders to develop functions by first creating a series of tests that the new function must solve. The benefit of this is that once your app grows more complex and you add new functionality, you can see if any existing tests have failed, meaning that something broke (and now you know where to find it). Look no further than any popular project on Github and you’ll often see a “tests” folder.

Today, we’re going to talk about setting up tests using Tape.

Tape is an alternative to popular testing suites such as Jasmine and Mocha. Like any tool related to software engineering, there are some developers that strongly prefer Tape over other options. It’s fairly easy to setup and can easily be run in automated task runner tools such as Grunt and Gulp.

To use it as part of your project, you can install it through npm:

  npm install tape --save-dev

Once it’s been added as part of your project, you can create a new tests.js file and require the module.

For our demonstration, we’re going to write a simple test that checks if my name is Dave, plus a few additional parameters.

Start off by setting up your test.js file like so (you can name it whatever you prefer). I’ve commented the code for some additional clarity on what’s happening here.

// Require the Tape module imported from npm
var test = require('tape');

// Write your tests in the code block
test('All about Dave', function (t) {
    // The number of tests that you plan to run.
    // NOTE: If this number doesn't match up with the number
    // of tests that are run, your test will fail.
    t.plan(2);
    
    // Let's setup some variables to test
    var name = "Seymore";
    var city = "Oakland";
    var favBaseballTeam = "Athletics";

    // This test will check for my favorite baseball team.
    // The first parameter is the result, the second is
    // the value you're expecting, and the third is the message
    t.equal(favBaseballTeam, "Athletics", "Favorite baseball team should be Athletics");

    // This test will check for my name.
    // As you can probably assume, it will fail.
    t.equal(name, "Dave", "Name should be Dave");

    // This test will check if city has been set:
    if (city) {
      t.pass("City set");
    } else {
      t.fail("City not set");
    }
});

That’s it! You can run Tape from your terminal and point it to your newly created test.js file in order to run it.

We’ve been working on many projects lately that have utilized MongoDB as the primary means of database storage. I have previous experience building and using MySQL databases, so the idea of these NoSQL databases is a new concept for me.

I’m not one to shy away from new technologies, so I’ve been trying to embrace MongoDB and learn how to use it.

One of the most important things I’ve been learning is how to view the databases, collections, and records that I’ve saved in my various applications through the MongoDB command line interface.

Let’s do a quick walk through and pretend I have a database dedicated to baseball.

Once you have Mongo installed on your machine, you run the interface by typing mongo in your terminal. Now, you can bring up a list of databases by typing show databases.

How do we use a particular database? Easy! Just type use [database_name]

use baseball

Awesome! Of course, you’ll want to do more than just “use” the database. We want to see what’s inside it. This is accomplished by telling mongo to show us all collections (e.g., think of these as “tables” in a traditional SQL database).

show collections

Awesome! Now we have a collection of teams and collection of players. Well, let’s display everything within a particular collection. In this case, let’s print out all teams that we have stored in our database.

db.teams.find()

Great!

Now, let’s say you’re looking for a particular record. How do you limit your search to just one thing? Like this:

db.teams.find({team: “dodgers”})

Now, you can imagine that if we had more data, there are a lot more things that we could search for and find. It’s pretty powerful!

Anyway, this was a quick tutorial on how to use the Mongo DB CLI. I hope you found it helpful!

I recently utilized Firebase to power the database and back end of an AngularJS web application I’ve been working on.

Firebase was proved to be amazingly easy to setup. Their “5 minute quick start” sold me on the utility of this service.

How easy is it? Let’s go ahead and create ourselves a persistent chat client in about 5 minutes. I’ll assume you’ve had some previous experience with Angular, but it’s not required.

In an empty HTML page, let’s add the Firebase Javascript library in the head section of our page.

<script src='https://cdn.firebase.com/js/client/2.2.1/firebase.js'></script>

Alright, easy enough, right?

Now, you need to create a reference to your Firebase database inside your script tag. When you sign up (for a free, even!), Firebase will give you a random URL that links to your new database.

So, a reference in your script tag, like so:

  <script>
    var myData = new Firebase('https://d______.firebaseio.com/');
  </script>

Okay, okay. Not too bad.

How do you start sending data to your new Firebase DB? You just apply some Firebase methods to the reference we created about. In this case, we’ll use the set() method.

  // Store values from our input boxes here.
  var name, text; 

  // jQuery or other magic here to set input boxes
  // to the values above.

  // Save to our Firebase DB using the .set() method.
  myDataRef.set('User ' + name + ' says ' + text);

You’d likely use jQuery to set the values of a particular input box to the name and text. You can also pass in objects to the set() method like so:

  myDataRef.set({name: name, text: text});

Another option that you can utilize to store data inside Firebase is the push() method. You can utilize this method to easily create lists of objects.

  myDataRef.push({name: name, text: text});

Okay, we talked a lot about how to send messages to our database. But how do we retrieve them? We can create an event listener using the on() method, like so:

  myDataRef.on('child_added', function(snapshot) {
    var message = snapshot.val();
    displayChatMessage(message.name, message.text);
  });

And just like that, you now have a working chat client supporting many users and can share data to all clients using it. Amazing!

First off, getting home early last night was amazing. The sun was still up when I left class, Kerry was still awake and in the living room, and even Benson was finally happy to see me. After unwinding (and meditating) I went to bed at around 9:30PM and only ended up waking up once (from around 3:30AM to 4:15AM).

But I still managed around 7 and a half hours of sleep! And even got up for a 3 mile run with Benson.

Basically, I did everything possible to try and ensure that this would be a good day. And you know what? It was!

So, knowing that our instructors said that “this week is going to suck,” I decided to be a bit more strategic about picking my partner. I sent a message to the young kid who gave a presentation last week on building a ray tracer, and asked if he wanted to pair up. He said sure!

I’ve wanted to work with him for awhile. He’s just absolutely brilliant and probably the smartest person in class. After hitting so many walls last week, I thought it’d be interesting to work with someone who is able to pick up these new concepts easily. I suppose it sounds like I’m trying to get someone to “do my homework” but that’s not it. I ensured I got as much out of it as I could. Anyway, more on that later.

We started with our usual toy problem. This time, navigate a tree and return all elements using a “depth first search”. I don’t entirely understand what that means, but we were basically traversing a tree and returning all values that matched some criteria as a flat array.

I didn’t haven any trouble building a recursive function that could traverse a tree (amazing!), but I had a hell of a time trying to apply a provided filter function to my array. I just couldn’t get it working and only got 4 out of 7 possible points.

Ah well. After this, it was our sprint reflection / feedback session. It turns out, this is one of the last times Hack Reactor is doing this because it was happening so frequently and students weren’t finding much value in it. I thought there was a good compromise, like maybe once a week or so, but ah well. I guess our lecture schedule is getting bumped around and this will give us more time to code! Yay!

We went to lecture and had a brief overview of the Model-View-Controller architecture in general. I think most of us understand it from a high level. It’s getting down and dirty and figuring out where things get plugged in that get crazy.

After lecture, we had some time to explore the problem on our own. It took me 45 minutes of looking at documents and source code to even get an idea of what we were going to work on. I was getting a bit worried. This was going to be intense.

Lunch involved people asking me where I was going (cheap Bahn Mi sandwiches nearby) and 5 others coming along. Hah!

We came back from lunch and had another 45 minute lecture on “The Secrets of Backbone JS” which gave us some hints to get started. And then it was time to pair up! We claimed a workstation and chatted about our expectations for this sprint. The goal was to build a playlist / queuing system for a music web application.

I told him that I didn’t feel completely comfortable with the material so far, but I wanted to do everything I could to get a better understanding of it. He was completely onboard.

One of the first things we had to do was draw out a “system architecture diagram”, which kind of explained how our app was supposed to work. By the time I was done drawing it out, it looked like a drunk person tried to make a circuit board. I have some work to do there.

We started off with me navigating (so I was telling him what to do) and basically kept those roles for the rest of the day. When I would get stuck on a problem, he would gently prompt. “so, where have you seen that function used before? What do you expect to happen here? Can you explain to me exactly what is happening here at line 57?”

It was awesome. He was patient, enthusiastic when I figured something out, and knew how to ask questions that didn’t give away the answer. We made some pretty significant progress!

Things started to slow down right before dinner — I guess I was hitting a mental wall. For dinner, we split up, I went to the mall to get a mean bowl of soup. (Man, that sounds so sad that we often resort to going to a food court for meals — though other people in our cohort often go to a nearby Subway. Uggggggh).

The after-dinner lecture was given by a fellow student who recently graduated college (so many young kids around here — feeling old over here in my 30s!) and shared her college thesis project, which was studying the rise of Bitcoin in Argentina and whether it could be used as an alternative currency compared to the Argentinian peso. It was an interesting premise, though I have to admit that I have less than flattering thoughts about Bitcoin.

We went back to our workstations and made some significant progress again. It’s nice to step back from a problem for a bit and come back to it later with fresh eyes and a fresh mind. By the time 8PM rolled around, we had finished all the basic requirements. It was amazing!

I feel like I really learned a lot about how this particular MVC library works, and it’s going to be very helpful going forward. I’m not sure I could build an application from scratch right now that utilizes this architecture, but I’m sure that will come in due time.

After hours, we spent some time helping out our neighbors who were trying to get their own web applications to work. It was fun to see my partner in action, as well as get to test my own chops and explain how this stuff was supposed to work to others.

I spent another 45 minutes or so working on the day’s toy problem, trying to get my filter function to work, and I’m not sure what’s going on. I ended up leaving the building at about 9:30PM. Tomorrow, we’re going to work on some of the “extra credit” portion of this sprint and try to build in some new functionality. Also, I’m going to go climbing with a few people from class during our extended lunch. I haven’t done that in ages, so I’m looking forward to it!

After getting home and going to bed last night, I woke up about 4 or 5 times throughout the night after dreaming of various whiteboard problems. It felt like my mind had an actual electric current going through it and it was just buzzing with nonstop activity. Needless to say, I’ve been absolutely wiped out today. This explains why it’s 8:15pm and I’m heading home on BART. The sun is still literally above the horizon right now. (Interestingly, I didn’t meditate last night, so it might be a good experiment for tonight.)

After taking BART to school this morning, there was a crazy bum on the sidewalk yelling. I accidentally made eye contact with him, so he helpfully walked me to school.

And by helpfully, I mean yelling things right into my face while waking next to me. “DO YOU KNOW WHY I DON’T LIKE YOU. DO YOU KNOW? DO YOU?! I’VE HATED YOU EVER SINCE I MET YOU.“

He left me alone once I got in the building. The security guard in the lobby shook his head and said “welcome to my life every morning.” Anyway, it was an interesting way to start the morning. I never really felt threatened, just felt sorry for him.

Anyway, school was good.

We did our usual assortment of toy problems. This time, we had to find common characters between two different strings and return them. For example, you’re given ‘aeiou’ and ‘abcde’, the test would expect to get back a string containing ‘ae’.

I didn’t do it in the most efficient way but I did it! I finished with some extra time so I tried to refactor my code to use a more efficient method and ran out of time.

I feel like I’m getting to the point where I have the tools at my disposal to solve any of these problems, I just don’t know the most efficient way to do it yet. But I’m really trying to think about it more!

My partner and I continued to work on our current sprint and finished up adding a few “nice to have” features to our chat client before lunch.

One thing we encountered whenever we look things up online (this happens a lot to all of us and Hack Reactor actively encourages us to solve problems on our own this way) is that there is a universally hated site that pops up to the top of the search results for nearly any web development problem. It’s called W3Schools and has amazing Google ranking for some reason, even though their answers leave a lot to be desired. It’s really just an ad network.

Anyway, they are so derided that people at school generally call others out when they see them on this site. So, we made a little bet.

Each time one of us clicked a link to W3Schools, that person would owe the other partner a beer. So, we started keeping track on a whiteboard. I ended us losing the day and owe him a single beer.

Myself and another classmate (who was my coding partner a week ago), walked down to the Ferry Building for lunch. On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday we have a two hour long lunch which is provided so that people can exercise or work out. It’s a nice way to get out and enjoy the day.

After lunch, we decided to split up for a bit so we could do some solo studying on the Backbone.js library. Our instructors strongly suggested that we try and complete the extra credit for our current sprint by converting it to use Backbone.

Holy crap, what a beast of a process. It’s probably because I don’t really understand much about something called the “Model-View-Controller” architecture right now. But it was some crazy hard shit!

We watched the solution video to this sprint (which included converting the project to Backbone.js) and we still didn’t understand it. We tried our best anyway but didn’t finish.

That said, even when things weren’t going well or we weren’t understanding some concept, we were never frustrated with each other and always having a great time. It was awesome!

Dinner was pretty uneventful and the student presentation was given by a friendly fellow who is visiting from Florida. His talk was about planning for retirement and “how to manage the piles of dollars we’re all going to get once we graduate.”

The rest of the evening was spent messing around and trying to get stuff to work with Backbone. We didn’t get very far (nor did many other people). Tomorrow is going to be interesting!

Looking forward to eating some sleep tonight though. I’m ready.

It’s kind of amusing that our 13th day at Hack Reactor is on Monday, the 13th. After the way things were going recently, you wouldn’t have been surprised if this day was coincidentally on Friday, the 13th instead.

Anyway! I am happy to say that today was downright amazing. Especially compared to last week.

We started off with a self assessment and I think I did as well as I could have. Pretty much completed all the problems — though this time 3 of them involved writing about time complexity. Not coding, but actual writing. This is something we lightly glossed over in an earlier lecture, but they really want us to understand it. I’m gonna need to spend more time studying it.

The other two problems involved translating something from one style of code to another style (mostly easy though something was breaking for me) and finally writing a function that can return an array of duplicate letters given some input (eg., Mississippi return an array of [i, s, p]).

I finished right as our hour long block of time expired. Then we started a new white boarding experiment (instead of the usual sprint reflection). This time, we had to whiteboard a problem that involved using recursion to traverse a tree and return every value in a flat array. I can’t even attempt to type that out, but you can see the results in the attached image for this journal.

We paired up based on who was sitting next to us, so my new partner was this fun Russian classmate who had hosted a meetup for a number of us prior to the start of the program.

One of the things that our instructors mentioned we should eventually do is to try to do this stuff in an interview style. One person sits and the other explains the problem. I don’t think anyone is quite ready for that yet so we both worked on this together.

Afterward, we went to lecture to learn about our new sprint: using jQuery and AJAX to interact with servers and navigate a RESTful API. We were going to build a chat app (and all the data was going to be shared and available amongst the entire cohort, which set up some epic trolling).

One of the things our instructor informed us about is that we’re going to be converting our web app later this week to a framework called “Backbone” and he said it’s generally one of the more difficult problems in the course. “Basically, this week is going to really suck for you guys.”

Whatever, I’m not scared!

(Oh shit oh shit)

We went back to our desks to work on the problem on our own before lunch. Most of the assignments we get involve a suite of tests that we need to complete and pass before we can move on. I was so excited to start playing with the API, I just dove in without looking at the tests. Oops!

What’s crazy is that I was getting things working pretty quickly. I think it’s because I have some familiarity with this sort of thing thanks to some previous projects. That said, it was pretty easy to figure out any potential problems that came up. It was a nice confidence boost.

Lunch came and went, and we had a brief lecture on cross site scripting vulnerabilities and how the browser security model copes with this sort of thing. It turned out to be especially relevant after everyone paired up and started coding.

My partner for this sprint was a fellow Oakland resident (like us, him and his wife also found out they were pregnant right before classes started). I met him the week before school as well, so we have a bit of history already.

Let’s just get this out of the way: he was awesome. He’s really sharp and I was able to learn a lot about debugging our web app from him. He has a pretty keen eye when it comes to spotting errors and deciphering what they mean.

We were able to pass all the tests relatively quickly. We did get hung up on the last test and asked for help. The HIR said, “eh, don’t worry about that test. It looks like your code works already, just implement the basic functionality of the app for now.”

And we did. It is soooooo refreshing to have a partner who is on board with that!

Anyway, since we were all building a chat app that wrote and sourced data from the same database, you can imagine the fun that people started to have. Building functions with 100 millisecond loops that would repeatedly post stuff like “8th floor rules!!!!!” And trading barbs with the cohort on the 6th floor (who were using the same database).

People also realized that they could inject JavaScript files into other students’ browsers that would change how the page was displayed, how certain actions behaved and even throwing up infinite pop up loops. It was mayhem. We basically invented another form of Reddit. (Didn’t I make that same joke on day 1?)

Anyway, it was getting obnoxious, so I found a function that sanitized user data and stripped out all these annoying XSS attacks. I posted it in our Slack chat channel (our official internal chat service as opposed to this thing that we were building). People seemed to be pretty happy that I found that.

Dinner was frantic because I was finishing up my PRESENTATION.

At 6:30, everyone gathered into the lecture hall and I gave a 5 minute presentation called “A brief (and animated) history of the GIF.” It went really well and people seemed to really enjoy it. It was fun!

After that, we spent the rest of the evening cleaning up the rest of our code. After hours, I started to watch a Lynda.com video on the Backbone library to try and get a head start on this week’s main topic. It’s going to be intense.

I left the building tonight at 9:30pm.

So, I got home last night and tried meditating thanks to a suggestion from Kerry and one of our neighbors. Basically, it’s been hard for me to fall asleep because I bike a mile from the BART station late at night on my way home, which gets my heart racing. On top of that, my mind is still so wrapped up from the events of each day that it just races like crazy.

So, I downloaded an app and tried it out and I think it really helped. It’s weird and crazy and strange, but I dunno. It was kind of nice to try and force your mind to not think about anything for 10 minutes or so.

Anyway, I woke up this morning and started to re-implement the project we were supposed to work on yesterday on my own. I made some pretty significant progress before I had to leave the house and head to school (wait, is it Saturday?? Oh man, it’s Saturday).

Today’s toy problem was a bubble sort. It’s one of the most basic concepts of computer science and we had to come up with a way to implement it from scratch. This means you’re given an array that looks like [5,1,3,4,2] and have to come up with a way to return [1,2,3,4,5].

It wasn’t too difficult though I don’t think I solved it in the most efficient way. I feel like I can work on that sort of thing later when I have more fundamentals down. Right now, at least I can solve the problem.

After that, it was pair time. I showed my partner the progress I made and he seemed impressed. So, he begrudgingly agreed to let us try modifying our existing code from my own source code. So we did! Mostly. But then we got stuck on stupid stuff and went to get help from an HIR who basically said “you guys really need to ignore this complexity. I know you talked to Marcus last night but that guy it a genius and probably explained things in excruciating detail. You don’t need to know any of that!”

No kidding. I’ve felt pretty comfortable not totally understanding how certain things work when it comes to these third party libraries and I think that’s important. I get the curiosity, but we don’t have the time to get hung up on it. The HIR left us with some more advice, “use whatever resources you have available to you to implement the code and then start trying to understand it once you compete your basic requirements.”

At this point, my partner gets bummed out and sad and I basically had to drag him through my code to get stuff implemented. Right before lunch, we FINALLY got about 75% of the basic requirements implemented. I told him to stand up and then gave him a hug. A bunch of people laughed, we all high fived, it was good.

It was still frustrating but I tried to have a much more positive attitude about things today. I think going into the day with that mindset is huge.

Before lunch, there was a final piece of the basic requirements to implement and we were having a lot of trouble getting things to work. I suggested that we should just look at someone else’s code to get an idea of what was going on. My partner was almost incredulous, “wait, do you mean another Hack Reactor student?!?”

Errr, yes.

Lunch came around and he took off. I walked over to some of our neighbors and asked what they did to get this feature working (basically how to get our web app to respond to mouse input and actually drag and drop elements around the webpage.)

The answers were amazing. “To be honest, I have zero idea how to do it. I just copied someone else’s code and it worked.”

“Oh! The drag and drop code? I just found this example and copied it.”

“Oh, hahaha. That thing? I copied the code from our neighbor. It just works.”

So, I did just that and went to lunch. We got back from lunch and I showed him the updated code. “Look at this crazy thing. It works! Amazing!!!”

That did it. We finished the basic requirements. Since it’s Saturday, the official learning portion of the class ends at 5:30 (before our weekly social night kicks off). So, at that point we had a few hours left. I ended up watching the solution lecture videos that Hack Reactor provides after each sprint and then worked on some algorithm problems.

After that, social night officially kicked off at 6:30. The theme this week was karaoke night. So, a bunch of us went down to the 7th floor lecture hall, had a few beers and sang the night away.

It’s about 9pm and I just left Hack Reactor. Today was an outrageously frustrating day that made me feel like I might not be cut out for this. It’s a stupid and over dramatic thing to claim, I know.

Anyway, there’s a lot of unhappiness and negativity in today’s journal.

—

I woke up early and worked on my “letter asteroids” game for a bit and ended up showing a number of people this morning before classes started. People were getting an absolute kick out of it and it was great seeing the reactions. Tons of people had suggestions and wanted to see me take it further. Awesome!

We worked on a toy problem to attempt to calculate the nth element of a Fibonacci sequence. I completely screwed it up and spent 45 minutes just spinning my wheels and doing absolutely nothing. So, that was great.

Then we had our standard sprint reflection for a bit before we broke for our mid-morning lecture for our new sprint. This was going to be focused on a data visualization package called D3. I’ve been really excited about learning more about this library for a long time and have considered this sort of thing to be one of my strong suites.

The objective for this sprint was to build a simple game using D3 to show how powerful it was and other ways it could be used. (Hey! Another game, alright)

Basically, we were going to be re-implementing a game that was written in another programming language and we’d be able to reference these documents whenever we needed. Alright, seems easy enough. That’ll leave some time to really have fun with this package!

Hahahaha.

Today, we switched up to new partners. Someone I hadn’t worked with with yet wanted to pair with me and I said sure. He’s been pretty interesting to talk to in the past and he’s one of the few I met from the meet up prior to school starting.

So, I think I said this yesterday, but I distinctly remember one of the things our lecturers said during the first week was how pair programming was going to make us better communicators. And they also had a warning that if you are someone who has a problem with a lot of other people, maybe the problem isn’t them, but it isn’t you.

Between the last few days and today, I’m starting to think the problem is me. I mean, I don’t think it is! But things just went wrong from the start. We came back from lunch and sat down to get to work and it turns out he hadn’t even read the intro docs yet (which by the way, we had 45 minutes set aside BEFORE lunch for this specific purpose).

So he wanted to do that before we began. Sure, sure! Then we started trying to implement the game — he was driver since he was less experienced and comfortable in D3 and I would navigate. But he second guessed every decision I would make and strongly suggested that I not look at the source code for the previous game (again, written in another language, mind you!).

The API documentation for D3 is about 2,000 pages. There is no way we’re re-implementing this stupid cheesy game from scratch without some sort of documentation or reference material. I said as much, but he wanted to really dig in and reverse engineer a bunch of complexity from scratch. One of the things our lecturers really stress is that we should avoid unnecessary complexity. I was going to try and help him walk through it but it wasn’t going well.

On top of that, he grabbed one of our whiteboards and started to write a list of words we should not say to each other! Stuff like:

• I think
• I feel
• basically
• actually
• we should
• actually
• like

And he continued to update it whenever he heard a new word that he didn’t like either of us using. Great! I quipped that if he kept this up we wouldn’t be able to talk to each other.

Anyway, we continued struggle a bunch before dinner and I think people around us were picking up on our frustrations and realizing that we needed to clear our heads. A fellow student was sitting at the workstation next to us and asked me, “umm, want to get out of here for a bit and grab dinner?”

I ended up inviting my partner as well since he had no where to go. We had a pretty good chat about what was working and what wasn’t working and it was kind of nice to have a third person there to break the tension.

So, dinner was great! We returned to our workstations with renewed vigor and a sense of purpose.

And pretty quickly ran into the same problems again and again. Arrrrggggghhhhh.

On top of this, an HIR wanted to talk to me about Monday’s self-assessment test, which I had thought I’d done pretty well on. We sat down and he pulled up one of my problems and said, “I’ll be honest. I have absolutely zero idea what you were trying to do here.”

So, we went through this problem and 2 others, rewriting my code line by line. It was definitely helpful but I was a bit flustered from the day’s events and struggled my way through it. It’s stuff like this that fosters imposter syndrome and makes me wonder if I’m in over my head.

Toward the end of the night, I finally suggested that we should scrap everything we have, start over from scratch and reference the provided source code (since everyone else was doing that, too). My partner replies “Dave, I really don’t appreciate your negativity right now.”

…

I’m assuming a staff member heard us because a few minutes later Marcus, one of the cofounders (and a lecturer) came over to us and asked if everything was okay.

He has the patience of a saint. I felt like my partner was getting bogged down in the complexity of how the library worked and Marcus spent the next hour and 15 minutes explaining to both of us how this sort of stuff worked but why it was important that libraries abstract this stuff away from us. It was great spending one on one time with Marcus but frustrating to realize what sorts of things were blocking us from being able to move forward.

Ultimately, we accomplished approximately zero things today. I finally left “early” at 9pm because I couldn’t take it anymore.

Maybe a night of solid sleep will help. Reset, reboot, and head in tomorrow with a better attitude.