(Shakespeare photo courtesy of Wikipedia)
Boy do I love a blank canvas!
That’s what NetCrafters has been for me over the past year. I came from a budding 8-year career working with closed systems that were purposely isolated from the Internet for security reasons. I worked on servers across the country that housed clinical information for millions of people. I was always working within very strict guidelines and always with proprietary systems which yielded zero results for the prized “ask Google” solution we’ve all come to rely on.
Now I’m on the cutting edge of technology in every way. The tools we’re implementing at NetCrafters are easily available and not a single one comes packaged on a disk, or inside a box, wrapped with cellophane. Everything can be downloaded, learned without a classroom, and in most cases without a visit to the book store! Every day I read my carefully selected RSS feeds for the latest updates on many different fronts. Each and every day something amazes me. Think about that… Every Day!
This correlates to a high probability that each and every day my understanding of the tech soup I’m swimming in will change. This doesn’t come without some serious challenges, of course. One of which being the urge to go backwards. The thousands of lines of code for our Jasmine CMS tool is constantly swimming in my mind. Each time I discover something new I immediately start a cranial search for applications of this newly minted puzzle piece… “I know this will fit somewhere.”
The challenge comes with deciding where the line is. At what point does going back and updating old methods become counter-productive? They will eventually need to be updated – undoubtedly – but they’re working now. Nobody is complaining about them. In fact as far as everyone who isn’t as intimately familiar with the code is concerned, everything is working great! But now I’m waking up in the morning and immediately thinking about how exciting it would be to spend the first few hours of the day crawling like a spider through thousands of lines of code and cleaning out the cobwebs. It’s a glorious and refreshing feeling until…
Someone inevitably asks the question, “So whatcha been up to today?” A very well-intentioned and perfectly acceptable question, mind you.
To which I must reply, “Well, I discovered this amazing, flashy-new-shiny way to do the same thing we were already doing but now it’s 1.78 seconds faster and involves about 3 hundred fewer lines of code.”
And of course the response tends to be, “Ah, cool. Is it something you can show me?”
Which brings the, “Well, not really…”
But that’s the beauty of our team. We all trust each other to make good decisions while considering the whole. It may not have been one hundred percent necessary, but if it helps my mental sanity then we’re all better off!
I’m thankful and appreciative to be able to paint on the most interconnected, dynamic canvas in history – the highly malleable canvas of 1’s and zero’s – each and every day.