Week 7 at Makers Academy.
We are not here to learn Ruby, we are here to learn programming. With that in mind this week begins a shift away from ruby (for now) towards… javascript!
I am reminded of a saying.
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
Often at Makers (indeed anytime you are learning something new) there is so much that isn’t familiar that it is tempting to gravitate towards what is. It’s always comforting to use what you already know because 1. there’s less to learn and 2. it always feels good to think you know something.
But there is a danger here. You only ever know what you know. More importantly; you never know what you don’t know.*
If you aren’t aware of what you don’t know about something, you aren’t always aware that there is something else to know. This can be disastrous.**
Enter the Rabbit Hole.
You are presented with a new problem. Often this is gonna involve a new technology. You think you have an idea of how to tackle it (it seems kind of similar to that other thing you did once…), so you fire away. But then it’s not quite the same, so you have to change this. And that doesn’t work for this plugin, but it’s okay because there’s a work around….
Two hours later you’re googling how binary files are executed by the OS. If you could just figure out how the Ruby compiler works….
And the rabbit hole goes ever deeper.
It’s often not that you don’t know where to find the answer, or how to look for it. It’s that you’ve started off on the wrong foot. You haven’t stopped to think that there might be a better way.
There’s a momentum to the work we do, where progress feels like going forward, and a change feels like the opposite. It’s hard to train ourselves out of this way of thinking.
What makes this especially difficult is that sometimes perseverance is the answer. Sometimes a hammer is the right tool, and sometimes even with a hammer the job requires perseverance. I’m trying to work on noticing when this isn’t the case.
The harder you have to try to make something work, the higher the chance that there is a better way.
*incidentally one of the major reasons why I started this course. Self learning is all well and good, but when do you know you are ready for an interview?
**And/or highly embarrassing. And therefore hilarious. (For everyone else.)
***DISCLAIMER:
Pretty much everywhere I said “you”, I meant me.
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Originally published at 36bcab.wordpress.com on January 13, 2016.
