5. Ask for help.

Ask for help man, it’s awkward, especially if you pretended to be the expert in some way before, but in the end it’s the short way.

But where to ask for help? Anywhere! You can get inspired by anyone while solving a problem, it’s not mandatory to ask an expert. It’s like going for a trip in a place you don’t know (like, let’s say Rome), you never know if the guy you are about to ask for directions is someway an expert or a tourist like you, you also don’t know if he even speaks your language, but you ask for help anyway. Why do you ask?

1. Because else your girlfriend (client) would screw you, as you’re looking totally dumb going up and forth without achieving nothing at all.
2. Because even if the guy is not an expert maybe he have seen a sign that you missed.
3. (Plus) Asking for help is always free and if the guy it’s not an authorized guide he also won’t charge you, if he is, well you will learn a lot of things, that’s sure.

Get rid of your pride and ask. I’m not the first one saying this but I felt that it was important.

See you next time,

Niccolo’

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Second, I’m glad to tell you that finally I bought a motor bike, an old and classy enduro bike, date of matriculation: 17th February ’89, this date kicked me hard when I read it on the papers, but in the end this “Date with destiny” was the trigger to my decision. The bike’s engine works like a charm, but there are still a lot of fixes and improvements to make. So wish me luck and to be able to follow my own “jokey laws”.

The last week I spoke about keeping the move going, it’s good for your mental health. So now lets say that you had your break, a little pause to the “game of the fixes” that now have to end. What to do next?

4. Work around.

Working around is like improvisation, it requires practice and attitude.

There are mainly tree ways I work around problems:

1. The long way: I try to get back in time to the breaking point, I erase the broken part, and then I rebuild it with a new code, even if it may be less efficient and ordered. It takes long but often this technique overrides the bug in the code, the bug i wasn’t able to find.
2. The other way: (personally the one I prefer) Instead of spending time and efforts on fixing the issue I try to figure out something similar but better, It’s a trick, but it’s really energy saving in the end. The hardest part after you found the trick it’s always to convince your customer/user that that change is an improvement. So be sure to not play dirty, it really have to be a better way.
3. The short way: Indeed the short way is also the 5th rule because of its importance, so catch you up next week for this.

P.S. I don’t think that there is a good translation in my native language for: “Work around”. Something like “Girarci attorno” maybe, but it doesn’t gives you the same amount of significance.

See you next week!

Niccolo’

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Don’t stare at me with that look, I’m not your life coach and I know it sounds really obvious.

Also, I know that in the previous post I promised you that the third law would have talked about “working around stuff”, but after a week I’ve changed my mind and I’ve decided that this topic should come first. That’s because dynamism have always been very important to me, it saved me from many headaches.

Cool off anyway, I’m no sportsman, so I’m not talking about physical exercise, listen up:

3. Keep moving.

Very simple, no?

The biggest errors that I’ve made in my life were errors made while stuck, mentally stuck. It’s not a strange kind of black magic, it’s simply because the moment when you get stuck is also the moment when you start to feel frustrated. As a human I feel better or at least more optimistic when I see improvements. In the first rule we learned that errors could prove useful, but reiterating an error over and over is simply being stuck.

It happens a lot of times: while facing an issue on a website you feel like blocked, it’s because you don’t get any satisfaction as any solution at all. So you hit over and over on the same damn button.

Keep moving it’s always a better way to approach the problem, while looking for solutions you can slow down but you can’t stop. If you feel forced to stop you get angry and you quickly lose energy and concentration.

How to keep moving? How to avoid the empasse?

If you tried everything then you didn’t tried doing nothing at all.

Sometimes it’s better when you start feeling stuck, to pause, take a breath, and do nothing about the issue at all. It may sound as an excuse, but it’s not if it is your own decision and will.  This doesn’t mean that you should sit and watch the ceiling. This means that you can slow down, watch around and start to do something else, something that gives you a bit of satisfaction.

It’s easier to balance while moving, as I said, it’s obvious.

Here’s a list of activity I love to do, to avoid the “Rat in a cage” feeling:

1. Call a friend on the phone
2. Work on an easy task
3. Write a blog post ;)
4. Have a coffee
5. Go for a little walk
6. Go out and wash the car

Simple things, that gets you distracted. We tend to underestimate the power of distraction. It helps in seeing the problem from another point of view, it helps in finding something new to try out.

Again it helps you in your path to find “maybe” a work around. Speaking of which it will be the next topic, I hope…

See you next week,

Niccolo’

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The second law, comes as a consequence of my really long experience in making mistakes. That’s it, really long!

The second law states about prevention:

2. Don’t create the problem

There are many creative and, more or less, funny ways to create a problem:

• The one I hate the most is related to promising something you can’t achieve. There are limits, technology limits, human limits or time related limits, do not promise stuff beyond these limits, you are adding a problem to a problem. Do not promise things you can’t achieve! Never!
• The most creative way to generate a problem is trying to make things differently even when in the end you are making things more complicated. If it works well maybe its the right time to spend your energy and you efforts on something else. If wheels have always been round there is a reason, do not try to change the way they works if they are already simple to make.
• The least creative way is letting things happen, being idle, while the world changes. The world changes fast, the web even faster, try not to be lazy on that update that you have to make on the server, if you let it be you know what is going to happen next: performance loss, crashes, ecc. Problems you didn’t need.

I promise you that someday, if you want, we will have a chat on my brilliant ideas, ideas and mistakes so creative and out of the box that totally screwed me up when it came the moment of implementation, problems created by my “not-so-zen approach”. For now this trio builds up a good resume of what is not prevention. Today anyway I would like to stick on the first instance, the one related to promising beyond limits.

Let’s talk about language: “If you can’t solve it it’s not a problem, it’s called a limit“. The best attitude in front of a limit is to try to teach your customer, or yourself what it is and how the limit works. Think about gravity for example, everyone knows how gravity works, and no one really sees gravity as an issue, it’s a limit that we came to understand as a part of our environment. You have to be sure that who asks you for a solution is able to understand what you can’t do and why you can’t do it, it’s a matter of culture and education. After recognizing that what you’re facing is not a problem, but a limit, the problem is gone.

Don’t forget also that sooner or later, after we understood the limits that gravity impose to us, someone came finding a way to work around it, inventing airplanes.

Work around, sounds familiar? Looks like it’s already time to talk about the third rule. We will, next week, on this blog.

Niccolo’

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I was very young and now as it always happens to me: the memories of the story inside the book are slowly fading away and mixing whit my own experience, but this book is still something I’m really bonded to and you’re going to know why reading trough.

To be honest my experience with motorcycles lacks of exciting maintenance stories but, on the other hand speaking of websites I have much much more to tell.

Fixing websites is my work and my own way to feel that kind of pleasure that only the solution of an hard equation would give.

Still, fixing something is a pleasure and I will not be here ruining yours, talking about how you do fix one particular thing on your website, there is Google for that, I would rater speak of what’s my philosophy on making stuff work again. I have a long list of rules I follow, the first is the one that I will show you today, by far the most general and important. This rule is not mine, it comes directly from Pirsig‘s book:

1. While maintaining a website, never apply more than one change per time.

Let’s say you do have an issue on your website, and you apply a series of changes all together to the system. The system suddenly starts working like a charm. Now, how do you determine what made the website work again? If someone would ask you, “how did you fix it?”. Could you answer? You can’t point out which one of the changes was the solving one.

Make one change, then test, another change, then test again, this is what experience is, else it’s called luck.

Errors are a part of this cycle, to learn from them you have to make them, but always one by one. In the end will come the moment when “that change” is not an error and is also not just an attempt, it’s the solution.

This works for everything, works for life, for spaceships and for computers. It works because even if you weren’t able to find the solution, at least you learned something, but what if in the end after trying everything you had, you still can’t find a fix? There is a time to learn and a time to earn, you don’t earn money with philosophy, trust me, money comes trough the fix. What then?

Then there is another rule, in another post, coming probably next week.

Niccolò

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