Of all the things I miss about working at a larger company, it’s having other developers around. Not so much for the ability to work on larger projects, but mostly to have people to bounce problems off of. I think if I was to graph out my time allocation for the past two years, I’d see a huge spike in “working through a coding problem.” I don’t think I’ve gotten dumber, but I have gotten slower, and it’s all due to those roadblock kinds of coding errors that, without a second pair of eyes, simply “take as long as they take” to solve.
Today I lost 4 hours to debugging some javascript when the problem was in the HTML. Once I realized what was going on, I did the happy dance followed immediately by the argh argh argh dance. That should have taken 15 minutes to fix, but I let myself get drawn down blind alley after blind alley…
I don’t see a new hire in the near term, so what’s a single dev to do? Here’s the plan: from now on, don’t spend more than 15 minutes on a problem.
This is one of those “turn your weakness into a strength” things – there are always 5 or 6 projects going on here, plus maintenance, so if I’m stuck on a problem, I’m moving onto a different task in 15 minutes. Whatever it is, it can wait until I get stuck on the new task. I’ve had too many cases in the past where I come back to a puzzle and the solution is lying there with blinking runway lights. Yes, some of these puzzles were actual sudoku puzzles. No, switching from a problem to sudoku doesn’t count.
I’m also going to use a timer to track those 15 minutes so maybe I’ll cheat less. Hopefully there’s a Vista sidebar gadget (the site’s down at the moment), but I’m tempted to bring in a real timer so I can share the joy with my office-mates.
It’s not the be-all, end-all solution, but it’s a start. I’ve only just realized what’s been slowing me down, so hopefully this’ll lead to some new realizations and improvements. Of course, if I speed up too much, we’ll never hire any more developers…
[tags]GTD, debugging, productivity[/tags]