Wizard, Know Thy self

Fundamental nuggets for Developers

To perform at your best, you need to apply this old ancient Greek wisdom from Socrates. You need to know who you are why you think, feel and choose to do things. You need to understand the forces and influences that have shaped and shifted your thinking paradigm. You need to know why you go about things the way you do.

During those days when I was a new kid on the programming block, one major problem in Ghana was poor user interface design and overall user experience though that dated around 2006. I felt customers deserve more than this and a great opportunity to woe clients and customers. So I set out to make a difference through the software applications I create.

Knowing others is intelligence;

Knowing yourself is true wisdom.

Mastering others is strength;

Mastering yourself is true power

~Lao Tzu

I begun having design eyes for nice looking software. The ripple effect started showing. I will spend a lot time focusing on user interface, user experience, nice to have stuff that weren’t explicitly part of the requirements and whole lot of tweaking. Sometimes a project I could complete ideally within a week or two began taking months.

I acted this way because I had a judgement about who I am, deep down — we the best kind of attitude and always want to feel like I nailed it flat. At the end I make good software, but doesn’t always meet time and budget for the clients.

This paradigm shift affected me till some time when I realized, it is not how I always want it but most time how your client and the company you work for needs it. The time they need the software delivered, the vital functionalities.

So I changed gears made my thinking slightly flexible to fit my partners expectations.

Better a diamond with a flaw that a pebble. ~Confucius

I saw that most projects are long term. So I will first work to deliver standard and simple design putting functionalities as the priority. But Wizard, this will require a little bit of discipline on your side as your brain will still mire you to your default thinking paradigm.

The Danger

If you don’t make your actions a bit flexible to fit situations, A Little dude will run errands around you and be delivering like a pro. Meanwhile you are better than him at the core. But nay, the market don’t know the tools, the plans and design ideas, what they want is that you deliver at least any way to them and appetize yourself through continuous delivery where you can put a pinch of your salts in there.

The concept painted above is a major way by which startups fail. Startups fails because of the attitudes of the core developers of their platforms.

As the saying goes attitude is everything so will your attitude go a long way to manifest itself in the products you build.

We all have this drive and innate to be great at things we do, but this can sometimes eat you alive from the inside. It is the bewildering reason for most non-performance cases, but this doesn’t mean throw gibberish to your clients out there.

For more insights about knowing yourself I recommend Ethan Greavu article What does it mean to know thyself.