Quick and dirty, and I like it…

I have been re-reading the Tao Te Ching and one of the learnings that resonates with me is:

The knowing of life cannot be grasped as a concept; it is known through actual living experience.

For example, for me in this sense, I can only appreciate happiness when I have experienced sadness or enjoy abundance when I have been in scarcity.

I joined the Talent Compass team in week 8 of 12 — that is, with only 4 weeks to create a prototype that helps the Mission Beyond trustees raise the funds necessary to create a product that helps young people from underrepresented groups have an equal opportunity to reach and fulfil their potential in life.

Here the detail is the time; again only 4 weeks to create this prototype.

At Red Badger, we have basic development principles. To cite a few examples: test-driven development, pair programming, continuous delivery, code review, open-source, etc.

Each of them takes time, but in my opinion, the one that takes the most are tests… So we decided not to.

If you are a developer like me and you read the last sentence, you will be surprised and even feel dirty, like something is not right!

At the beginning of 4 weeks, it felt good. Good because it gave us speed and cadence, which gave us energy and confidence that we would reach our goal in the remaining time.

But, in the last week of development, dealing with a few interweaving calls to the server, in conjunction with the different states of the components, made development feel less than solid. Why? Because when we are introducing a new feature, we cannot easily know if it collides with another feature — or worse, if it generates errors in other parts of the application.

Only the confidence of knowing that my colleagues are doing a great job, that they also review my code before going to production, gives me sustenance and the foundation to feel that development is solid. That is why I appreciate their work (Declan and Carlos) and the work of those who were before me, Ed Compton and Matt Thomson.

Now, returning to the Tao Te Ching: “the knowing of life cannot be grasped as a concept; it is known through actual living experience.”

This experience was quick, dirty and it felt good because it confirmed what I already knew as a concept, but not as an experience, and for that I am grateful.