Dear Family and Friends,

Things are going great here in Dallas! We are continuing to make steady progress on the FieldWorks Language Explorer program. In the weeks since I last wrote you, we have made many significant improvements.

This last week, we prepared a “test release” of our software in order to get feedback and testing on the many recent changes we have made. This test release will allow us to get feedback from a wider range of people than our usual internal testing and is just one of the many things we’re doing to make sure the finished product will be as useful to field workers as it can possibly be.

In the weeks leading up to the test release, we did our best to resolve any serious, crash-causing bugs. This was a great opportunity for me to become more experienced with some of the more complicated internals of the program, and I was able to fix a number of important bugs.

The “Help” links project I mentioned in the previous update is nearly complete. With almost 450 working help links, I usually only have to make help-related changes every few days. My current projects cover a wide range of areas. I’ve been working on everything from making small wording changes in dialog boxes to debugging hashmap corruption deep inside the C++ GUI generation code.

I know some of you are probably curious about what a typical work day looks like for me. So, to help with that, I brought a camera to work last week and took a few pictures.

Every morning starts with the entire department gathering for a brief devotion and a time of prayer. After that, we have a stand up meeting where everyone gives a summary of what they’ve been working on. Here, Eric explains the progress he made on an issue the day before. Shown in this picture are: Mike, Arin, Susanna, Eric, Michael, and Dan.

We use sticky notes in conjunction with an issue tracking system called JIRA to organize the tasks that need to be completed. JIRA is good for keeping track of the details and history of an issue, but sticky notes make it easy for us to see what needs to be done at a glance. This picture shows the tasks currently up for grab. When a developer decides to work on a task, they move the sticky note from the white board to their desk.

Here’s a shot of my desk during a typical coding session. You can see a few sticky notes on my monitors. Those are the tasks I selected from the board to work on. To the right, you can also see some of my tea set. I love fine tea, so I brought my tea collection to the office and have started making tea every afternoon for me and a few other tea drinkers in the department.

In order to make communication easier and to facilitate “pair programming,” all of the desks of the core programming team are in one area. This arrangement has worked out very well and really does make it easy to ask people questions and get input on potential solutions to problems.

Please continue to pray for the team as we work on this project. Please also pray for God’s guidance in my future plans. I am seriously considering taking classes at the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics (their campus is also at the Dallas Center, where I work) after I finish my degree at LeTourneau University. These classes would give me a basic understanding of linguistics and would be useful for a future career with Wycliffe, if I decide to pursue that.

May the Lord bless you.

Some more pictures from the office.