Today I want to write about something, which has been on my mind for quite some time.

A situation that every developer knows

You are working with your team in a project and you have to implement a new feature, but you are not quite sure how, yet. You think by yourself: “I am sure that at least one of my colleagues must have had the same problem, which he solved somehow!”

Or imagine another scenario

You know that you have solved a specific problem some time ago, but you don’t quite remember everything of the solution or where exactly you implemented it. You start working on a solution from scratch with the uncomfortable feeling that you are just reinventing the wheel.

In practice

Today I had one of those typical situations again. In our team we have just started a new project using meteor. At one point in the project I needed to implement a form, where the submit button should be located outside of the form. It was not a big deal to solve this, but it took me quite some minutes. I am convinced that my team members will have the same situation in the future and then it will also take them some minutes to solve the problem I have already a good solution for. Since I had no way to share my solution with them, I posted the code snippet in our slack group chat, which let everybody see what I have done. But I knew that the day after tomorrow nearly nobody would remember — and even worse (as I know me): I also would forget it in a few days.

Stop reinventing the wheel

I am not quite sure how to get rid of this problem. But what would really help me and my team is an application, which helps us to organize our problems and their solutions in an elegant way. An application which combines the functionality of a notes app with simple organization on a pinboard and the possibility to share code snippets. We want something that lets us document ideas and problems and solutions that are too small to write an article about, but which are worth remembering. And as my team colleagues and I really like to work with post-its, we got stuck to the idea of a pinboard and thought about an app, which solves the problem that I described vaguely above.

That is how we came up with the idea to build pinboard.xyz. The only thing I needed is just a good reason to transform my thoughts into code. And now there is a reason: The Meteor Distributed Hackathon. As we are convinced that such tool will help not only us, but many other creative people out there, we will start working on pinboard.xyz tomorrow during the hackthon!

If you are interested in how it turned out and/or have experienced similar problems in your daily development work click here, to sign up for getting notified when the alpha version of pinboard.xyz launches!

What do you think of the situations I described above? How often do you experience similar situations and how do you deal with them? Let me know in the comments or tweet it to me (@philippspo) using #pinboardMoment ;)