Mistakes made and lessons learned

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season where we are looking at mistakes made and some lessons that can be learned from them. This is going to continue this episode. We're going to continue looking at some things I did as a kid that you may be able to relate to. So it's things that I don't think they are completely uncommon when you look at just childish mistakes. This episode, we're going to talk about a rusty nail. Now in the previous episode, I talked about the neighborhood I grew up in, and actually was a lot of the the city I grew up in was a place where there's a lot of construction going on. You may be able to relate depending on what part of the country you're in or part of the world. You may be in a situation where the area you live in is experiencing a growth period and land is being converted to buildings, housing, whatever. And that's the way it was for me as a child is that we places that were vast empty fields when I was very young turned into some cases, malls and subdivisions and things like that by the time I left the area. And there's still growth going on actually, even as I left. So this was over a long period of time, but it meant that there was never a lack of houses and lots that were under construction where you had what was just an empty patch of land that was turned into a foundation. And then framework went up and suddenly next thing you know, you got a house in a yard and neighbors were neighbors. And because of this, I spent a lot of time running around partially developed land, places where there were houses that were in varying states of construction, whether it was, like I said, just like a foundation, whether the foundation was just sort of marked. But there was no lack of lumber and shingles and all kinds of tools and screws and nails and stuff like that. And just always laying around. It was easy to find a place that was essentially a live construction site. And it was hard to actually avoid such places. And so that's where this next story begins is I was at a friend's house as at this point, this is where you could, you know, as a child, you could ride your bike a few miles and it wasn't, there wasn't any concern of that. And so this, you know, this friend of mine was a couple of miles away. And so I went to his house and we were out hanging out and doing stuff and we decided to go for whatever reason. We had to cross a couple of houses that were under construction. And I can't remember if we were, I think we were like walking to go play basketball at a court and we're coming back and rather than walk on the, if there was even a sidewalk walking on the street or something like that, we decided to cross a couple of the lots and just sort of, you know, even though there was all kinds of crap laying around on the ground, like, eh, we're just going to go from point A to point B, take the shortest route. Well, that ended up being a slight problem because as I was walking along, there was a board that had a nail in it. And lucky me, I managed to step on said nail and I was sitting there, you know, I was in sneakers, tennis shoes. And so I had a nice rubber sole and as I step, luckily it wasn't something where it was, this goes back to the prior episode of it. Luckily, I didn't have enough momentum that I don't think I got my foot fully down before I realized I had stepped on a nail and that hurts. And so it's one of those, I made the step, nail went through the shoe, started to go into my foot, it hurt. And therefore I immediately, you know, stepped back and looked at it and, you know, looking at it from the underside, I could see that, hey, there was a nice puncture in my shoe and my foot hurt quite a bit. And I don't remember if at that moment I checked it or if I waited till we got to his home because it did, you know, it was one of those that hurt enough. But I think I did limped back to his place, pulled my shoe off, saw that it had gone through the sock as I expected. And you know, my foot was bleeding because it had gone through my foot. Not a lot though, because it was, and it didn't go all the way through, you know, it had punctured the skin and it wasn't horribly bad. And although I didn't really take a good look at the nail, you know, it was dirty enough and stuff like that. And this happened to be my godmother, my godparents house, and she happened to be a nurse and was like, okay, we're going to get you to the doctor and have him take a look at it. And you know, particularly to make sure that you have to worry about tetanus and stuff like that. I was at an age where it was close enough that they said, hey, we need to get you a tetanus shot just to make sure it's okay. The thing, the nail itself didn't do any great damage. I don't even know if I had a bandaid over there may have been a little bandaid we put on or something like that, but it wasn't, you know, there wasn't, it wasn't like stitches or any severe rap or anything like that was needed. They're just like, yeah, it'll be, it'll be okay in a few days. And here's your tetanus shot. Now this is not a major deal in the grand scheme of things, but it is a nice follow up to the prior one, this prior episode where we were talking about momentum and being able to change direction in this case. And it's, it's sort of pre that before you get even into that point is being able to, it's very important for us to look at the landscape that we were about to step into when we're going into building a product or building some solution and understanding the risks that are involved. In this case, I wanted a, we'll call it a shortcut, but I just wanted to take the direct path from point A to point B. Now there were other options or other paths I could have taken, but I decided to take that. Now I don't know, and I'm pretty sure I did not consider the risks if there were, you know, that I can, I don't think I considered there were risks of taking that path. I didn't think about the fact that, you know, there may be something, there could be a pothole, there could be like that, you know, the exposed nail or something like that, that could cause me harm. And you think about any, just on a walk or run, you could have things like that where you step on a nail or something like that. But you could also have like loose ground or potholes or something where you end up twisting an ankle or things like that up to the like more severe things like a minefield or something like that. And the key to this, that, you know, the lesson to be learned here is that if, which goes to what I could have done, had I known, had I really thought about stepping on a nail as a risk, I think I would have been a little more intentional and paid more attention to where I was stepping. For me, I didn't even think twice about stepping on a board, although there's actually a couple things that could have been wrong there because it could have been, you know, it could be a nail, exposed nail, but I also could have had a board that was loose or something, it could have moved and twisted an ankle. There are a couple of things that go wrong there, but I was, we'll say oblivious to the risks and in so doing where a very little bit of effort would have allowed me to avoid the problem of getting a nail through my foot. It wasn't, I wasn't in a situation to utilize that effort and avoid the situation. And that's really the, you know, that's the important thing for us to think about when we're stepping into a solution, when we're walking into an environment for whatever application or product or just about anything that we're, you know, in life, it's worth it for us to take a second and, you know, in a sense, survey the landscape, consider what it is we're about to step into. Now you can get stuck in analysis paralysis and, you know, thinking that through every time you take a step, but I don't think you really need to do that per se when instead you just are aware of your environment. And this is where when we're building solutions, experience can be a huge benefit because we will have traversed that landscape before and we will have an idea of what are, what are the risks involved? What are some of the things that we need to be aware of so that we can avoid getting a nail in our foot? And a lot of times in a lot of industries, this is, these are big things because you may have requirements within that industry. You may have compliance things that you need to know about that you need to prepare for in order to build a valid solution. I think a lot about a lot of times in this case about healthcare and in the U.S. HIPAA constraints and requirements because your entire environment has certain things that are required of it in order to comply. And these are things that are, they're not trivial necessarily. Things dealing with how you store data and encrypting and designing data to remove like personally identifiable information and some things like that. They aren't trivial, but going back a little bit to the prior episode, if you wait until you get into the solution before you try to make sure that you're, you ensure you're complying with those requirements, it can be a real pain. I mean, it can require you to completely redesign your solution. Whereas a little bit of work upfront and a little proper design and some things like that can allow you to comply without a lot of extra overhead. And that could make the difference between a project being successful on budget on time and one being effectively a failure, being late, being way over budget. Or if you miss some of those compliance items, it could be actually a complete failure and completely useless at the end because it doesn't comply in the way that it must. And it's not just healthcare. There are other industries where you have those kinds of compliance issues that you need to consider. And as we get into a more connected world, these things show up more and more because there are security type issues and design considerations that show up time and time again and with particular devices. If you're building mobile applications, there are things specific to those solutions that you need to think through. The simplest thing would be, is this a device that is going to always be connected or do we have to design for a disconnected state? Because those are very different. And if you're in a situation where you've had to do proposals or estimates, then you could see very quickly where those things can be a huge issue. That can dramatically change the level of effort, the resources required and things of that nature. And those are all critical when you consider the things that you use to score a project as far as whether it is successful or not. And this really goes back to that idea of, if you consider there was this entire, probably quarter, third of an acre lot that we were crossing. And I don't know how many nails existed on that lot. Probably not too many that were sticking out of a board in a way that if you step on it, it's going to go through your foot. So there are a lot of ways for me to traverse that lot without stepping on a point where I would get a nail through my foot. So with minimal effort or even better luck, I would have gotten across that without any problem. Now, luck is not something we want to count on when we're building our solutions, particularly if it's a large product or a large project. But it does point to the idea that there's not sometimes a lot of effort required or forethought required to allow us to avoid issues that could become very big ones. So it is very much worth our time to pause before we step into a solution, an environment, a context, and just be aware of what we're stepping into so that we can make the right decisions so that we, maybe even almost by default, we have a mindset that changes our approach in a way that may dramatically change our odds for success. It's why there is the old phrase of only fools rush in where angels dare to tread kind of thing is that it's don't be that fool that rushes in. Take a second at least and consider what you're stepping into and maybe it'll help you step into it without stepping on something or in something that you would rather not. That being said, I'm going to step into my day, but first we're going to consider it a little bit where I'm going with it. And hopefully you do the same that you look out there and say, OK, what am I taking on today? What are some things I need to do to help maybe improve my odds of a grand and successful day? But no matter how you do it, as always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. One more thing before you go. Develop a new podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. But if you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us be great, if you go out to developer.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. Now you can go back and have yourself a great day.