Its All Bee

24 February 2012

Prince's Trust Charity: Wild UK Challenge

As part of my NY resolutions to do more community volunteering and challenge myself, I have signed up for the Wild UK challenge. I have set up a new page to keep track of this event but please please help me raise funds by sponsoring me.

Please click here or click the Wild UK button above for more details.

Many Thanks

Please don't forget to “like” me on Facebook if you haven’t done so already! Thanks for your support!

Bee.

19 February 2012

Rock Climbing Addiction

“There are only three real sports: bull-fighting, car racing and [rock] climbing. All the others are mere games.” -Ernest Hemingway

With the beautiful weather upon us this weekend, I thought getting out there before the snow or rain returns was a wise idea. Weird that I ended up being indoors most of Saturday morning to early afternoon. Not lounging might I add. If you hadn't figured out what I was doing from the title of this post, I had one of the best indoor climbing sessions yesterday.

Windows Phone 7 Application Development - Sink or Swim.

Shhhhhhh! If you sit quietly you can almost hear me sigh in relief to a nicely paced start of the week. Last week was very long and gruelling involving a lot of late nights in the office trying to finish off a project which had a tight schedule.

Ok, so let’s start from the beginning. I did a short course on Windows Phone 7 development at the end of last year and I when I got back to work after the Christmas holidays I was immediately informed of an upcoming project on WP7. You can imagine my excitement as I have been really keen to join such a project to the point where each time I sent an email to scheduling about upcoming projects the email had such a line “…if there are any WP7 projects please please please let me know”. I also made a point to join WP7 projects alongside those scheduled for me. Volunteering to test or adding small features nothing major but a great platform to learn from.

Finally got onto this project and boy was it at the deep end! Be careful what you wish folks because you just might get it. The project had a rather tight schedule and involved a lot of Sprints(Agile Methodology). These sprints made getting work done a bit of a task as some of the designs were still being changed as I was coding. In a way the tight schedule and the fact that I was given something totally new made the project even more challenging and in doing so I had to force myself to quickly grasp some of the ideas about object oriented programming concepts in relation to WP7 that I have been contending with for a while. With the deadline looming I called in some reinforcement to help me out as there was no leeway on the deadline. I had a WP7 Pro come to my rescue. I learned a lot more in a week than I would have in a month by collaborating with Mr WP7 Pro. Just because I was working with a Pro does not mean the Bee is now a Pro, although I am working on that. I learned so much as well as things that made the process easier such as getting the flow of pages before dwelling down into the data binding of the project and a lot of other WP7 specifics that the device emulator can and cannot do. The project was handed off on Friday for testing to another team so just about made the deadline.

The Power of Self-Compassion: be kind to be more effective

A trying a week had me re-evaluate some of the challenges or projects I would like to take on this year. Having had a rather busy January, I am starting to wonder if I may have set myself unachievable goals. Although achievable, but unachievable in the sense that I may have taken on way more than I will be able to complete this year or that I will complete all of them but have left no room to actually reflect, which I think is important. One of the biggest obstacles we all come against is ourselves and I have found that over the years I have found myself demanding a ridiculous level of perfection and just really being hard on myself which in turn can be counterproductive.

I used to keep journals a long time ago and a couple of months ago I happened to look through some of my books from university and came across one of my journals from my teens. I read through private thoughts and recalling just how keen I was to study away from London and the all amazing things I was going to do with freedom from prying family eyes. In reading some of the pages I realized that journaling offered a bit more than blogging does, in that because they are private so you can be as honest and cheesy as the moment calls for and talk about any and everything without censoring your written thoughts.

One of the reason I wanted to get back into writing (blogging rather) is that writing is said to “help make emotional transitions and help us process information about circumstances we find ourselves in”. With this in mind, blogging also offers the opportunity to keep track of one’s development as well the ability to be able to easily look through some of the milestones and the process of your journey in reaching your destination; that of the goals or life circumstance you go through. Reading through some of the journal entries brought back memories of a girl that always used to get lost in the clouds. I am a bit of a day dreamer. It was almost like watching a movie of snapshots into my life at different points in my teens into adulthood.

Pages