It’s a bit of a funny question because I don’t really think I’ll be struggling with a sense of purpose, necessarily. I think this week will be more of a sense of direction perhaps? I’m working on some new stuff at work that I’ve never done before: creating a custom slack app and integrating it with an iPaaS. It’s one of those situations where I know exactly what needs to be done and I think I know how to get there, but I don’t know the exact syntax, so to speak. And annoyingly, the documentation around what I am trying to do with the iPaaS solution is surprisingly minimal.
I normally don’t mind learning new things, especially something like this which is admittedly pretty cool. It’s definitely experience that will be useful in the future, too. It’s just frustrating to be on such a time crunch due to poor planning and changing requirements from the client. In hindsight, we could have gotten started on this aspect of the project earlier on, so that’s a lesson learned: we need to be better at working on multiple parts of the project at the same time. I know that if I was doing this on my own time without the pressure of client satisfaction, I’d have more time to learn about the technology, the right way to do things, and I’d be able to create something I’m proud of. At this point, I’m going to have to settle for “good enough”. Maybe some day I’ll get a chance to improve the integration to follow best practices and be more proud of the work.
Honestly? I do take a lot of pride in my work, and I think that is pretty obvious to those around me. I always want to deliver a high quality product that not only works, but is something that I am happy to put my name on. However, as we all know, we rarely have the luxury to do things the “right way” the first time. Sometimes, or perhaps most of the time, we need to let good enough be good enough. Lately, I’ve been embracing the idea of “making it work, then make it look good”. And to a certain extent, I’ve always followed that idea as I really like incremental progress on a project. I start with something simple and I slowly add it to. Over time as I learn more about the tech stack or language, I’ll go back to the old parts of the project and bring them up to my new standards. That may be a simple refactor to make the code more readable or a drastic rewrite to follow a better architecture.
I get to do this a lot more on my personal side projects like this journal and personal site or for some of the IP I develop for the company I work at. All of these have timelines that are more fluid or no timelines at all. In the case of work IP, I generally add more features to the tool as I discover parts that I don’t like doing manually or when I think of ideas to analyze the data and metadata better, for example, to draw new and additional conclusions.
All of that to say, I’m definitely going to be busy this week and I doubt that I’ll have any issues with a sense of purpose, at least at work. On the home side of thing, I don’t think I really have much of a trouble with purpose either, at least day to day. There’s still that looming “what if my purpose” question in the grand scheme of things, but I’ve sort of resigned myself to figuring it out as I go. I don’t really have much of a plan and I just want to make sure myself, friends, and family are doing well today and prepared for a good tomorrow.
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