We’ve all bought furniture you had to put together ourselves. It’s the Ikea way, we can save money by putting in sweat equity, and get ourselves something less expensive and a little faster than waiting for it to be built and delivered and installed for us. Also we have a feeling of satisfaction. I felt that when when I hand-built my wood arrows for a slightly larger cost up-front but a lower one long term. It was worth not just the experience to me but the result.
When it comes to working with new software, it’s much the same way. We come to it for all those reasons (price, desire to learn, speed) and many more, but we have to build up the experience in a product to have the comfort and expertise to become masters of it. See, by making my own arrows, I know more about how they work and how they’re put together and why certain things happen. The head of your arrow is too heavy because you used a heavier point? That explains why the drop rate is so high! The glue used to attach the point is uneven and heavy? That’s why it wobbles! I know how they were put together, now I have a cause/effect understanding to my arrows.
Learning something new is always easier the second time. But when someone else tells you how to do it, you get the impression they feel that it’s as easy as pie. But it’s not to you. When I had to write a new plugin to act as a CDN for DreamObjects, I was frustrated. I threw the code out a dozen times, I burned it and started over, I forked and knifed and otherwise fought with things. And then, through all my frustrations, I finally understood and was able to write was was needed. When I went back to add a feature as requested, since I now understood how it worked, it was easy.
Part of the issue is that the second time, you’re not creating new neural pathways, you’re just using the ones you’ve got. They may be newish, but they’re not created out of nothing, which means you have a chance to follow your own footsteps. Much of this is exactly why I blog a lot about how I do things and how they’re created. If I walk first, you can follow and go “I like this, but I want that…” and make a fork in the path.
In and of itself, that’s how WordPress works. It’s made a pathway for you to ease your blogging and site maintenance, but it’s also allowed you to see the trail and blaze your own when you need, while still having some of the familiar inside. At the same time, when things go weird, or people want a new feature for WordPress, it comes back to the innovators and trailblazers to determine how to create something out of nothing.
Code is art. It’s creation. It’s hard. When people say “It should be easy to do this…” I wonder if they’ve ever tried to follow a new recipe, or if they’ve forgotten what it was like to learn to master a new video game, or even driving. All the easy things have already been done. We’re into the world of the complex, much of which we’ve done to ourselves, where to add one new, simple thing requires in depth knowledge. We’ve raised the bar on the entry to new code, which is a problem we’re all aware of.
But.
Once you get over that bar, once you’ve done this one time, once you’ve designed one site, or edited one page in HTML, the next time is a little easier. You don’t lower the bar, you build a step to make it easier to jump that bar. Even if it’s learning a new email app, or how to use your phone. No matter how intuitive a thing is, you still have to learn it!
So you have to keep trying and keep working until you too can say “It’s a piece of cake.”
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One response to “It’s a Piece of Cake”
To work hard you can see the results at the of all the hard works.