Nathan at Work

It seems that my coworkers, even my boss have gone a little bit soft today, in a very unexpected but reassuring way.

While considering the beauty and love in life, both chris and shri have ended up reverting the subject back to code, even bringing it right back to the same coding subject; one which was ultimately on my mind most of the day and last night, infact it’s always been there and very much defines why I am a coder.

On the subject of love, and more specifically how to deal with a certain woman, chris was debating two different approaches. The approach he took, and has always taken, was the right one I’d say.. simply because the reason a relationship ever get’s to a certain point, is because of the way both people are, to suddenly change the way one of you is and do something different can’t possibly work; it’s breaking one of the foundations on which the relationship was built.

Anyways, as developers do chris brought this back to the fact that there’s often two or more approaches to most problems, then went code specific; the most common way being to wade right in and wrestle the code in to submission, get it to work perhaps without understanding why, and assume or hope that it will continue to function that way.

The other approach chris pointed out, is to take it slowly, take the time to fully understand the problem, read, study, learn and finally work out the root cause of the problem, taking the correct path to write a beautiful, elegant and stable solution.

Meanwhile shri.. well there’s no way of putting it other than to quote..

I invite you to think about this problem as a rose… a once in a lifetime chance to appreciate something beautiful. Don’t just hammer away at it, break out of your habits, out of your box, destroy your preconceived ideas and look at it differently, try something new…

At the very least, you will learn something new and you might appreciate the issues surrounding it better.

Why so reassuring? well it points to them both being problem solvers, not only that but also appreciating the chance to solve a problem, studying, finding out all about it, fully understanding the task at hand before carefully implementing the correct solution to the problem. You’d be amazed how many coders are not problem solvers, lacking the ability to think on their feet and discuss things at a conceptual level, often even finding and fixing problems before they have happened.

Perhaps vainly I see myself in the problem solving group of coders, I’ve always thrived on a good problem, specifically code wise, a broken website, a server that just won’t play nice, a task that seems impossible, a problem with technologies I have no prior knowledge of, even a task that nobody else dare take on; to me that’s gold dust and the reason why I do what I do. I love a good solution, and can find beauty in well written block of code. Love to learn, and love to try new things, infact I’d never met anybody who tried new (everything) as much as me until I met shri, tis great!

To know the people at the helm (as it were) are of a similer mentality is massively reassuring; Primarily because every post I write, every peice of code I do, every job I’ve done for many years, my whole career even is pointed at analysing a single big problem, and finding the solution (which I think I have..). There will be a post soon about it, called The Broken Internet, it’s going to take me some time to finish writing as it’s a few years of research that needs to be made in to something easy to read; but it’s coming.. on the same note, the series of posts I’m doing on designing and developing this blog all lead to the same point, so I may as well skip to the end first.

@note
Kind of hoping that once Shri and Chris, and hopefully more of my kraya coworkers have read up on what I’m talking about, it’ll at best spur them on to help me implement or at least plan the solution, at worst I’m sure it’ll just niggle away at the back of there brains (as it does with me) and shape the decisions they make.

so ominous.

@context
I started this post at 1400, finished it around midnight; between I spent the day lugging furniture around the house; we had a problem you see, the kids basically overrulling the main floor of the house, we thought about it long and hard (Rachel and I) and eventually it came to light that the problem was because one of the kids bedrooms was on this floor, as was their toy room/living room. The solution was today, to move all the children on to the upper floor and remove the toy room; moving our bedroom on to the main floor of the house and thus making an adult only space in the house. Rather than kids running around us all day, we now have footsteps above, a great deal better. This ties in well though, as to get this fix I had to sacrifice my nice big bedroom with en-suite (not best pleased about that) but the simple feeling of freedom and space in the home is without a doublt worth it. So.. the correct solution isn’t always one you’d prefer, but to fully solve a problem you have to go for what’s right, not what’s easiest.