Episode Seven, Status Report
Or “The One With the Inevitable Delays”.
So, it’s the middle of January, and our site isn’t up. That is what people call a failure. More specifically, seeing as I’m the point person for this, it’s my failure.
As it turns out, that’s OK. Kinda.
I’m not about to go on some New-Age, Silicon Valley “Embrace Failure!” campaign, but I do think it’s important to see beyond the black and white of a situation. To rephrase the first line, our site isn’t up—with good reason.
Here’s where we are:
Assuming the Position
The more proficient coders at PT have been tied up doing some really interesting Virtual Reality stuff (that I’m sure you’ll be hearing about soon). That meant I ended up rolling my sleeves up and jumping into Sublime, GitHub, and (yikes) Terminal. Terminal!
Now, I’ve done better than I dreamed I would—deploying Foundation SCSS to Heroku via grunt and node.js sounds about as easy to me as juggling seven flaming sticks while riding a unicycle across a tightrope wearing a blindfold—but ultimately I’m not even 10% as proficient as the other guys here. While I’ve had some epic wins (figuring out how to animate a CSS link underline), other things have frustrated me beyond belief (absolute positioning across screen sizes).
Tagging Out
There’s a small part of me, probably leftover caveman, that can’t help but think “I can do this!”. The rest of me knows it’s not the best use of company time. Back to the whole burning hours thing.
It’s really hard for me to step away from something. I have“the polymath gene”—an unyielding desire to do everything. Not to mention my ego keeps reminding me I was once a Computer Science student. Thankfully, there are other pressing matters that require stuff I’m actually good at.
Patience…
Things get put on hold all the time. Especially in-house projects when there’s pressing client work to be done. It’s important we recognise the value of our own site, but it’s also important we attack it when we can all give it our best.
