Just Keep Building

Do you ever get overwhelmed with software complexity?  There is always it seems, a new framework this and a doomaflagit-that coming out.  More to learn, more to learn.

Learning is not a bad thing.  As we all know in IT, that’s kinda our thing … we keep doing that learning thing.

The upside of this is man our world is hardly ever boring.  The downside to this is you can get stressed out about all there is out there to learn, as well as the perceived speed at which you need to learn it.

Take me for example.  No seriously .. take me somewhere.  Maybe for a nice steak; I love me some steak.

But back to my point, in my case, I’ve been around in IT awhile now.  And even so, I still often compare myself others thinking, “Man I should have worked harder and I’d be where {insert name of person I admire in IT here} is by now”.

Or I see other folks who just “get” the newest thing, seemingly about as fast as I can snap my fingers, while I’m still stuck on StackOverFlow with 7 tabs open on the subject and a PluralSight video running on my other monitor wondering what ever made me get into IT in the first place.

Is that just me?  Probably not.

I imagine we all have done that.  Sometimes I have to remind myself this is fun.  The nights I spent in my room as a teenager with my Color Computer from RadioShack (yes I’m THAT guy) were not in vain.

That joy of problem solving is still there.

Sometimes that fact gets lost in the noise of working in an office environment or pressures from a client who just “wants it done”.

Have you been there?

So how do we deal with that?

How do we deal with it, especially if you’re having to learn a new thing while under a deadline that doesn’t give a frack that you have to learn that new thing.  (Deadlines are so inconsiderate right?)

So the mountain you have to climb looks daunting.  Or the big “building” you’ll have to create for this project looks enormous in complexity.

Well if you’re like me, and I don’t always remember to do this, you can go back to how you solved things when you first started.

Back then I wasn’t wringing my hands about the fact that “I have to type in this entire editor in BASIC from a magazine so I can save my programs on tape” … it was more like, “I have to get this one line of code typed in correctly”.  It didn’t matter that I had 1000 lines to get right, I just focused on the one problem in front of me.

So break those big things down into small things.  That’s what we do.  How many mountains have you built in your career for your employer(s)?

Probably quite a few.  If you look back, they were made up of a lot of small pieces.  So don’t focus on how big the overall wall is you have to build.

Focus on the next brick you have to put down.  Do it well.

And keep building.  Whatever wall you are building will get done, just like it always has.

One brick at a time.