Coffee percolators as a Progress Indicator
I used a coffee percolator for the first time the other day. The Makers kitchen is actually rather well-served, said percolator being a feature. Up to that point I’d been making coffee in the Czech style, in which you dump ground coffee straight into mug, add water, then wait about ten minutes for the grounds to settle. This works, by the way. It’s exactly what your cafetière does, just without a plunger displacing the grounds manually.
However, I’m not Czech, so gouging grounds out of my teeth every now and again gets old rather fast. I was standing in the kitchen one morning, staring at the percolator, and boarded this train of thought:
I would care for coffee.
I would not care for teeth grounds.
They have a percolator.
Percolators make a point of brewing coffee disinclined to assailing your enamelled face fortress.
I have never used a percolator before.
I will now attempt to use a percolator.
I will attempt to set it up, and if it looks like it’s about to go wrong, I simply won’t switch it on. This whole endeavour is fail-safe.
The reason this particularly heroic life milestone has made it onto the internet is that it was a direct result of the problem-solving paradigm I’m starting to acquire as a result of my training.
Part of the mindset of a modern developer, and certainly one trained at Makers, is an alacritous approach to issues you’re unfamiliar with. If you have to do something or use something you’ve never touched before, you don’t tell yourself (or your project lead) you can’t do it. You find some resources to educate yourself, such as a walk-through or beginners guide, you make some intelligent guesses, or you ask someone who might know to show you a few things. A thought that’s never entertained is that this is not something you can do because this is not something you know.
Something that’s happened to me at Makers is that I’ve set the bar lower for things I’m allowed to do. This sounds daft, but prior to this I genuinely felt that if I hadn’t attended a course on something and got a qualification, I simply wasn’t allowed to have a go. This used to manifest itself in my old place of work as a blunt refusal to have anything to do with printers. This is more of an issue than it sounds, because I worked in a small drawing office and plotted drawings of various sizes every single day. A plotter going down was an Issue.
This is not an attitude you can carry with you into software engineering. You are out in the breeze as a rule, not an exception. It is expected of you as a professional that you will keep yourself up to date with new technologies, and often that will involve reading articles and watching Youtube courses in your spare time. No one’s coming for you; maintaining a contemporary knowledge base is all yours.
This was how I came to find myself piloting a coffee percolator in a Shoreditch kitchen at 10:00 in the morning despite never having touched one in my life. Me Before this course would have looked at it and immediately dismissed it as an option, by dint of never having been shown how to use one. Me Now spent 10 minutes watching a pot of coffee percolate.
That was not time well spent, by the way. The things take their sweet time.
For anyone thinking about attending Makers, know this: It doesn’t sound like a long course, but you will leave this place a very, very different person.
