Over the weekend, I started refinishing a bookcase. Luckily, to make the job go quicker, I had an orbital sander, and got the right grit sandpaper to take down the finish. Got it all together, and got to work.
It took FOREVER.
Lots of running the sander over and over before results showed. It was frustrating. I wasn't happy, and the project became the bane of the household as it took up space for far longer than it should have.
Finally, as I was pushing through the last bit of sanding, I noticed a dial on the side of the sander. It went from 1 to 4, controlling the speed of the sander. I pushed it up to 4, and knocked out the last bit in no time.
Had I known about the button earlier, I could have saved myself lots of time and effort. Because I didn't know about it, a simple job took too long, and caused too much frustration.
This happens to us as developers, too. Ignorance about the full feature set of the tools we use can cost/time overruns in development. If we don't know that ASP.Net 2.0 provides support for something like cross-page posting, then we risk writing our own workarounds to solve these problems, which adds unnecessary time to the schedule, and unnecessary complexity to the solution. We pay the price up-front in project overruns, and also down the road in maintainability.
Developers more than ever need to know what their tools can do. Failure to fully understand the capabilities of the toolset can lead developers into very wrong-headed solutions, such as
pounding a nail with an old shoe or a glass bottle.
So what should developers do to get a better handle on the contents of the toolbox?
- Read. Reading really is fundamental. With the wealth of knowledge freely available on the internet, reading is the quickest and easiest way to increase your knowledge.
- Get Involved. A smarter man than I once said that a great way to succeed in your profession is by participating in the community that surrounds that profession. For the .Net developer, a place like forums.asp.net is a great place to start.
- Get more involved. Local user groups are everywhere, for most every technical interest. These groups offer another great opportunity for exposure to new technical ideas, and also are a great way to network within your local developer community. If the first group you find isn't a great fit, there are often others, so it pays to look around.
- Get even more involved. Right now, there are thousands of great software projects out there that are open source. You can download these projects, and help develop fixes and new functionality, for no compensation whatsoever! In all seriousness, good open source projects have very strong project and technical leadership, and they're a great place to gain even more exposure. Sourceforge is a good starting point.
posted @ Wednesday, May 30, 2007 9:28 PM