As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, my group is really great and I have very smart and supportive teammates. That said, i do like to let myself get stuck a little bit and try to figure out issues I’m having rather than immediately turning to them for answers. I’m not sure if this is how it’s done in an actual workplace, but in my mind I think it would probably be fairly similar.
This week, I was in this situation more times than I care to admit (2 times). The first time, we were getting our local environments set up with MySQL. My group chat was humming along and it seemed like both my teammates were set up in no time. I on the other hand kept running into issue after issue (especially in regards to getting mysqlclient set up correctly). I didn’t want to bring the group chat down and I figured if they were able to do it so easily, I should be able to as well. I set out on a StackOverFlow/Google marathon research session and after a several long hours, I was able to figure out what went wrong. I felt I took away a lot from the journey of fixing the issues but from a time spent perspective, is this the best way to go about it? I’m not sure.
Next was something that was simple and I felt I should know so rather than ask for help, I tried (and failed) to figure it out myself – pushing/pulling from Github.
Just as before, my team was chugging along and with both of my teammates already creating PR’s which were then approved and merged into the main branch. I was working on the main UI draft and was the last to complete my portion. In my great wisdom, I decided to trust my gut instead of asking for clarification on how to create a PR that can then be approved into main. What I did was push my code directly into main without requiring any review whatsoever. There is probably normally some checks for this, but because we are all owners of the project, we can all push to main. Luckily I didn’t cause any harm because we were just getting started, but this can cause some issues if it was done down the line i’d imagine. I should add that I’ve since learned my lesson and have created successful PR’s!
Overall, I would say that my take away from the first couple weeks is, don’t have so much pride that you don’t want to ask for clarification/help. Still though, remain confidant in your abilities and if what you are working on it’s too dire to the situation at hand, don’t be afraid to spend some extra time figuring out the problem yourself – the research into the issue/s can be a learning point that really sticks.
