Testing projects in real world situations can help uncover issues that we wish would have been discovered earlier. One such example was with my Speech Timer Project.
I traveled to Binghamton, NY so I could attend my family reunion and decided to arrive early to attend the Morning Knights Toastmasters meeting in-person. I brought along my Speech Timer to try it out at the meeting. Before the meeting even started, I ran into an issue. The clock connects to the internet to get the time to set the real time clock (RTC). I knew this but thought the clock would still operate as the RTC does not need to be set for the speech timer to work. The configuration is set for my home network so I knew it would not connect to the internet at the meeting location. I pressed the button on the remote to activate the timer function and nothing happened. I ended up tucking the clock back into my backpack. I’ll need to edit the code and run some tests to make absolutely certain that it will work when it cannot connect to the internet.
This lesson shows how important it is to test our projects in a variety of situations. I believe I have tested this scenario before, so I will need to make certain that I can recreate it with the current code base, then move on from there.
