Scope Creep

In project management, and especially in programming “scope creep” refers to the common situation where what’s required to regard a project as finished keeps growing. Most commonly, in the form of extra features required to be added to an application. I’ve especially seen this when clients see early versions of applications and it prompts them to request things that were not in the original specification.

My iOS development learning journey has been experiencing some of this as well. I started out with only four clear goals:

• Complete the Standford CS193p course
• Complete Hacking with SwiftUI
• Get an app in the app store
• Document my progress by blogging my learning

Some of the things I have been adding are easily justified – getting my head around git & GitHub make a lot of sense to add. Others (I’m looking at you the two hours I spent learning about customising my zsh shell), not so much.

The overarching goal is to be a competent iOS developer (at something around the junior dev level) in a year of part time study. Which I think I’m probably on track for, but I do keep thinking of things to add. For example, my HTML knowledge pre-dates CSS, so that probably needs a weekend spent on it so I’m at least aware of what I don’t know. Similarly, websites are no longer based on PHP – I’m sure any CS grads would have some JavaScript skills in their toolkit. Also, as part of developing an application, I should probably be able to standup an SQL server on AWS or similar with the required security.

Much to do.