You’re Already a Corporate Body, Don’t Behave like One
Drop Everything. Pick One by One
Learn from the ant! Plenty food available. Ant can spend days, weeks, sowing the best, large surface area leaf on which to keep the bolus of food as it is dragged across the ground. Smart. Smart? No!
Ant takes time to pick bolus piece by piece. One by one. Little by little. Step by step.
Ant picked up a piece to colony and realized, aah, I can pick up more. Ant returns to colony with a slightly bigger piece of the bolus, relative to the earlier one. That’s progress!
Ant drops everything (the food bolus), and picks them apart one by one. Ant has a complete bigger picture of what to carry. That’s fine. However, ant picks them apart and carries them, one by one.
Want to build a huge project with lots of moving parts? From the bigger picture (the entire food bolus), you already see some 15 independently complex modules (slightly bigger little piece of bolus). Each module likely has smaller moving parts.
What do you do?
You know your target. You know what you want. Now get there. How? Start small.
Let’s take this scenario. It might not be th hest of examples however I hope you get the point.
In building an authentication module for your application, I start by building the login component. In building this one component, I would make decisions along the line.
Decisions like what happens when login fails, how does my error message look like, what and how does my login page look at all. Will I let the forms push to the left or right?
What fields are required. Perhaps these details are already determined by provisions at the backend already. In any case, I’m making decisions that affect my applications and when it applies.
As much as the bugger picture is building an authentication suite, the pieces that come together to make an author module is handled step by step, one by one.
My trouble would be how to get my login component working. If the API is ready, then I make real API calls
You Talk Too Much
Diagrams Are Diagrams. Just Diagrams
Don’t sell yourself to money. Say no!
Long-haul Goal, Intermittent Rewards
Real Data is Real Data for Real
Number of Working Hours !== Productivity
Get me a Google Computer. I’m Not Using Mine
Reverse Documentation
Code your Comments, they say.
Build, Test, Rinse, Repeat is for a Reason
There is nothing like Talk, Test, Rinse, Repeat. Does it exist in the world of building web applications? Talk is cheap.
Meetings are Fun, That’s It.
Meetings.
Frontend Dev: QA, please the button colors and form field sizes, any feedback?
QA: Let’s schedule a meeting, today, 10 am.
Junior Backend Dev: Snr Backend Dev, please I can’t restart the services on the stage 3 server. Keeps throwing this and that error.
Snr Backend Dev: Guys (including QA, Frontend Dev, DevOps people) Meet me at 7pm today, and let’s get this thing done.
Meetings are fun. It starts. We all check out timestamps. ‘Let’s do this quick’.
2 hours later!
“You see why we needed this meeting?”, convener reassures attendees. What’s on the whiteboard?
Let’s do what? Was I not doing the “this” before I was roped into this lengthy unrelated meeting?
Meetings can be crucial. Except they can’t be a cheap way to go unproductive without noticing. That makes it fun. Want to kill time? Just setup a meeting.
Ever felt there’s been one particular product, of which there’s been a dozen meetings on? During each separate meetings, the same steps, the same process, the same goal, the same result of a particular product drum home repeatedly, and over and over again?
Can we move onto building the damn thing and go?
We all get it. But we don’t have it! What we don’t have? The application. We get it. We see it. We understand how it works. That’s it! It is only an application within our minds.
Thank you for helping me understand what needs to happen end to end. Now, let’s build it. Shall we?
Except there’s one last meeting! Duh!
Flexible is flexible and should be Flexible
Programming is an art. Expression of art happens at varied times in exhibited in different ways by people via disparate means. Developers excel in flexible environments.
I choose to be a developer, so I wouldn’t sit like a bank teller for 4-6 hours unend. Nor did I become a developer to stand attending to patients like a Medical doctor.
Honestly, I become a developer because I’m not smart and booklong. I wanted to love my job, and being a web developer allows me to.
Flexible development patterns are everything. Being able to move the “Login” button from left to right without having to go through an entire 8-10 steps of Product Development Lifecycle is essential.
People make rules, not Rules make people. Instead, operate with principles.
Instead of “It is the rule to report to work at 7 am or 10 am each day”, how about, “We do have morning huddles at 7 am or 10 am each day. Don’t miss them”.
Ooh, and when I do show up at 7 am or 10 am, don’t postpone the huddles. Do that once or twice, and neither your rule nor principle won’t mean anything.
(See Culture + Results – (Unnecessaries x Distractions) = Productivity)
Please, Keep Your Religion to Yourself. It’s Secular Work We Do Here
A very religious man named Charles Taze Russel once said, “Religion is a Snare and a Racket”. I am religious. Heck who isn’t religious?
Even the worst in society consider themselves religious. It is good to be truly religious, the right way. Its 2018. You wanna be truly religious, the right way? Praise the Lord.
Do I care? Yes. No. Maybe. What?
So the morning devotions at the workplace, singing praises and hymns to scare the devil off and bring prosperity. Hmmm. Are we a religious choiresters company, or a software development firm?
Prayer is great. Worship of God, awesome and beneficial and important. Can’t we do our worship of our ‘God’ in our various ways?
Heck, if all members of the company are Catholics, fine. How about you enjoy the Mass each morning! No hard feelings.
What if you all bow down to a Tree god located somewhere in the midst of the Dodowa Forest and have the picture at our office to worship each day? Fair enough.
The point? When we all have different religious backgrounds, handpicking a path for morning worship is discriminatory. You’re a christian. A Jehovah’s Witness. Would you allow, wholeheartedly, for an employee Muslim to lead worship on a Monday morning, committing the entire company into the hands of Allah through Muhammad?
Would you?
Or a traditionalist lead a working day with drums and chants? In a mixed religious belief community of employees, what would happen should we drop the religious daily activities, whiles each one does their prayers and or worship in their own way each day?
A muslim? Pray whenever is right for you
A christian? Same. Pray whenever right for you.
A traditionalist? Encore! Except don’t bring all the bells and whistles to the workplace. Wait what?
You see, it is easier for my beliefs to cloud how I view others. In order to ensure a common ground, unbiased view for all, please, all do your prayers on your own, if any.
And no! Please, no prayer clubs within a company. Jehovah’s Witnesses call each other to the side to do morning devotions. Same with Pentecost, Presbyterian, same. Then we come back to work in offices and call ourselves a “Team”?
A “team” that can’t team up to worship, is that one too a team?
So, paths that one can’t ply to the end, please don’t jump onto and walk.
Luke 9:62: “Jesus said to him: “No man who has put his hand to a plow and looks at the things behind is well-suited for the Kingdom of God.””
Culture + Results – (Unnecessaries x Distractions) = Productivity
When Meetings Happen, They Are Serious, Always
Ever been to meetings (usually a relatively lengthy one), topics get discussed, issues straightened and ironed only to realize 30 seconds after the meeting, something else would be totally contrary to conclusions at the meeting?
You ask yourself then, ‘what exactly the meeting was about?’. Some critical discussions are best done, face-to-face, over-the-table. Such meetings, when crisp and straight to the point, are priceless.
Except the whole import of the meeting crumbles to nothing when everything (or major action points) discussed at the meeting is tossed out the window just at the end.
Don’t invite a meeting if you know it is more of a ‘formality’ meeting, than one that should produce action points. What impression will attendees of a meeting get over and over, when nothing gets done according to what’s discussed in meetings? Will it be worth their participation?
Meetings are serious. Keep them that way. If you won’t stick to what is discussed at meetings, then don’t have them.
No! I’ve (You’ve) Not Done Anything
Stop praising me for what I’ve not done. Be realistic.
So I’ve done 10 different UIs for 10 different projects. I’m 20% done with each of them. You’ve ordered some to be sbaded off after 3 or 4 months of work.
None of the applications deployed for use in the “real world”. Not even for testing internally. These projects and their fancy CLIs sit on my nuclear plant laptop.
You know what I’ve done? Nothing worth congratulating me on. The various spin up projects don’t even, not even one, talks to a real API successfully.
All they do is consume generated data. Data from JSON Generator and Fakers. See, they’re called Fakers for a reason. You know why?
Duh! They’re fake! Real Data is real data (See Real Data section above)
I’m sitting ducks, and have no idea the way forward. Specifications keep changing by the minute. I’m confused. Which UI have we agreed on? Is it the one I built using Bootstrap or the one with UI Kit?
I added 12 modules. I was asked it should only be 4. After a short while, number of modules rises to 15.
Ooh so now I need a wireframe of all the UI pages? Good!
After all the back and forth, what I’ve done? Nothing. Why nothing?
Well, after all the effort, no real user uses the application. Not even our own internal team. So many missing pieces. Incomplete user experience flow. That’s not something. That’s nothing.
