Like millions of regular people, I have anxieties. I have a rough time sleeping, I stress, and I get depressed. Very typical behavior for many people.
Rather than pretending these issues were not real, I built an Android application and met them head on! I created Behavior Therapy Tracker and through its constant use I was able to overcome many of my anxieties.
Let me explain my story and I hope it can help you as much as it has helped me.
During the creation of my first Android application – Behavior Therapy Tracker – I wanted to display a list of behaviors to manage; more importantly though, I wanted an easy way for users to add new behaviors to the list.
My solution to this problem was simple, add a one-liner form to the footer of my ListView that contained the behaviors.
Just over three months ago, I posted a few memorable blogs (for me) in regards to a career change. The career change has been made and I thought I would share my retrospective on how it has affected me.
Following the format of the retrospectives I have been over the past 3 months, I’ll start with a check in word:
Rejuvenated
Making the move from an 85% managerial role to a 100% development role has completely rejuvenated me. In the past three months I have gained an incredible amount of knowledge and furthered myself as a person and a developer.
Moving along to the next items:
Since I’ve become an adult, I’ve had stresses, anxieties, compulsive behaviors. I’ve always had a hard time dealing with them. In fact, in looking back now, it dates back to even my childhood.
I created this Android app Behavior Therapy Tracker as a tool to help me; which it has immensely. It works by creating a list of behaviors. This list can contain anything that you wish to track. For example:
Along with behaviors, a list of refocusing activities are required. When you’re practicing behavior therapy, it’s important to first recognize your behavior (the list you created previously) and attempt to train your mind to ignore or avoid it. This is often accomplished with a refocusing activity. For example, when you are stressed, it’s often a good idea to turn the negative thoughts into positive thinking. Positive thinking is often a fantastic tool to overcome many anxieties and disorders.
After your behaviors and refocusing activities are created, you can now begin tracking your behaviors with this simple form:
For best results for tracking purposes, it’s advised to attempt and enter each occurrence immediately or on the same day. The reporting tools that have been created can hopefully help you detect patterns in your behavior, arming you with tools to help fight them in the future.
I’ve made this a paid application because I have a family to support and I invested a lot of time in creating this application. As a sign of support in return for what will hopefully help you, I’m asking for a small payment.
Yes. I already have a few ideas in mind to extend the functionality of this application.
I would be more than happy to hear your thoughts on the app. Don’t hesitate to email me at info at endyourif.com.
I’ve only been doing TDD for a few weeks, but I’m completely sold. I don’t want to go back! I’ll be honest though, it hasn’t been easy. I’ve made mistakes, I’ve wasted time, but I’m really starting to reap the benefits.
I’ve always thought I was a good developer. I write decent code and it works mostly as expected. It took me many years into my career before I wrote my first unit test. It always fell into the category of too time consuming or expensive. Oh the irony!
As I started learning how to write to unit tests, I always found myself rewriting things I already did just to get them to be unit tested; how frustrating! A unit test that should have only took a few minutes, ended up taking a really long time because the code had to be refactored just to be tested. No better way to turn you off from unit testing.
Enter test-driven development…