Script Monkey – A day in the life of a coder...

Script Monkey sometimes reflects on roadblocks and issues in order to learn how not to get stuck next time.

I was working away happily on a website, and all was going well. In fact, I was ahead of my time estimate and looking like I might finish the work early, see my kids and enjoy a movie.

All I had to do to finish was insert a class name into some elements using PHP and JavaScript, then I could use a CSS style sheet to change the colour of a box when the user had entered unsuitable data.

This is something I have done many times before, using different languages and approaches. Easy, or so I thought.

I went through the usual processes I follow, but as I had dome this so many times before, I skipped a step of hard coding everything first to style it.

I coded the PHP, had data flying around, received the data, processed it and used it to control the content of a web page. Nice... it was mid-afternoon.

I then spent 3 hours trying to colour in a border around an element with a data error. No matter what I tried or how I debugged, the blooming colour refused to set.

I tried everything; I mean everything.

  • I got annoyed. This did not help.
  • I got frustrated. This did not help.
  • I deleted a bunch of work and re-coded it. This did not help.
  • I poked the monitor quite hard, and it made some nice patterns. This did not help.
  • I gibbered and giggled like a loon for a bit. This did not help.
  • In the end, I gave up, stomped downstairs, and put the kettle on, then sat in the garden. This helped.

As I sat slurping my cuppa, I ruminated on why I could not solve what I had approached as a simple problem. The answer came quite quickly, I had underestimated my opposition. Never underestimate your opposition. In this case, I was my own opposition, or rather my arrogance that I knew everything involved.

I had been trying to style completely the wrong element, but in my locked-in thinking that I knew exactly what to do, I did not stop once to ask myself whether I had made a schoolboy error. As soon as I relaxed, stepped back from the issue, and thought it through, the answer presented itself with immediacy.

All I had to do was approach the problem logically and by asking myself what the easiest way should have been, then ask myself if I was taking the easy route and the problem resolved. A different perspective, approached calmly and logically and 15 minutes after my cuppa, the site was working and it was dinner and a movie with the kids.