Casse No-i // The unfiltered ramblings of a 20-something designer/dev with a bad case of the people-watchies... a girl who just needs to get it off her chest once in a while.
I find if I set myself a set topic idea for each day of the week, I have much better luck with some daily creative release. Yesterday I created Don't Be Stupid Tuesday. Today I'm starting Thankful Four Wednesday. Every week I will publicly remind myself of 4 things I'm thankful for. I think it's appropriate - Poor Wednesday is stuck in the middle of the week and often plagued by too-much-to-do-before-Friday-but-I-still-wish-it-was-the-weekend-itis.
Especially on your worst day, it's important to remember all the little things that make life worth it. That's what I want to focus on. Things like oreo cookies and reading updates from The Onion that really add up. To the best of my ability, I'll try to theme my thanks every week. I'm also going to make an attempt to start something with #thx4wed on the Twitter. I hope you'll join in, the more thankful we can be together - the better!I wasted almost five hours of my life this morning because of the (what I consider to be) poor choices of the person in my position before me.
Five hours of playing IT-for-free when I could have been doing my "real" job building a billable web project. Five hours of learning about something that, although related to my day-to-day, doesn't serve me as much more than a tertiary bullet point on the laundry list of my career goals.Five hours that skewed the day so badly it was hard to accomplish anything relevant in the afternoon. Five hours of pain I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Not even that person-before-me who ultimately made today possible.And while I'd like to discuss all the events that led to today's debacle - I'm focusing my first Don't Be Stupid Tuesday post on what I think is the most important point of the lot because I think it's the easiest to accomplish. And, that's the importance of appropriately documenting your project for future reference and maintentance, whether its for you or whoever comes along to take care of it next. This isn't the same-forever-only-2-people-know Coke Secret Formula. This is a live build that real, normal people need to use in every day situations. It needs to be adaptable, fixable, and understandable. I shouldn't even have to say this, but the number of issues I hit with things I didn't build - issues that would have been moot with the right notation - issues that are normal concerns of someone in my position, managing the care of 100+ sites, and building new constantly ...I don't know how to stress the importance of taking that little extra time to DOCUMENT YOUR SHIT. Comment your code. Provide a README or similar notation. Tell someone else where you keep your list of passwords. I'm not saying publish it to your Facebook - be smart about it. And whatever it is, consider the person that may be fixing it later: a PHP file may need some commentary to suit another developer, but a mail server may need some direction in layman's terms in case the IT is out of the office. Point is, whatever you've put together, you're not going to be there forever to take care of it. And even if you are, who's to say there won't be a day some catastrophe hits and you're not there to troubleshoot, or maybe 3 years go by and you plumb forget what you did in the first place. It happens.I mentioned earlier that this was the easiest to avoid of all the causes of today's mess-i-wouldn't-wish-on-anyone, and I stand by that statement. Stop leaning on excuses, and start breaking the bad habits.
I'm not just asking for my own sake as the "person that fills your shoes next." Do it for your development as a professional. As someone who cares about being a Senior This, a Lead That, or simply a hard worker who is seen as a competent, accountable whatever you are. I know when you stop and think about it, you'd hate to be in my shoes: wasting time, keystrokes, and sanity on things that could, and more importantly SHOULD, be much less stressful.I'm even willing to bet you've already been there once or twice before.3.27 minutes ago, I finally resolved an issue that could have been avoided with the proper documentation.
3.27 minutes ago, I felt torn between having lost 4 hours of my life and being "grateful for the experience."
3.27 minutes ago plus the four hours prior, I was painfully reminded, as I am all too often, of the importance of thinking outside the moment you're standing in - especially as a programmer or anyone who creates something to be used, tweaked, and interpreted by future custodians.
3.26 minutes ago, Don't Be Stupid Tuesday was born.
Starting this afternoon, and every Tuesday to come to uncertainty, I will post for your pleasure (and hopefully your empathy) my musings on the small things in life you can focus on to make yourself a little less "stupid."
That is, I want to share some antecdotal -let's call them "recommendations"- on how one might go about functioning well in a world that has OTHER PEOPLE IN IT (besides just you!) A commentary on how to better yourself as a functioning member of society, if you will. Most of these tips will spawn from my specific adventures as a php-developer-slash-swiss-army-web-everything, but I hope that even if you don't speak the same flavor of programese as me (or, if you don't speak it at all), you can still take something away from the whole mess of it.
I hope you'll share comments or recommendations on future posts I can plug into this category.
Subscribe to this blog or simply look for my #stupidtuesday posts on Twitter to join in the fun.
And please, don't hesitate to share some #stupidtuesday of your own!
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Needing a place to simply "talk about whatever," I must admit my motivation behind this blog is entirely self-serving. While that doesn't mean I intend to only talk about "me me me," I don't want you to be surprised by the veritable whiplash you may receive trying to follow this mess as it traverses topics as varied as:
