This week I finally finished the core functionality of my team project for the mobile app and spent some time looking through all of the code that went into this process. I tend to put on my blinders when programming and focus heavily on the task immediately before me. This provides me the ability to break through almost any obstacle I come across, but also blinds me toward thinking more holistically. While I have achieved every goal my team decided upon, and the app has a solid UX experience, underneath lies an ugliness that must be addressed. I am a contradictory perfectionist, in the fact that I strive fore a perfect end result, I often take a winding, messy, chaotic journey there. I will need to spend significant time in refactoring my code for readability and modularization, and to reduce inefficient repeating of logic. This is my burden to bear, since I demand high expectations from myself, but I do so in an ‘ends justify the means’ method.
These thoughts occurred to me as my wife and I were finally getting around to Spring cleaning, which is usually demarked in our house by the installation of air conditioners. Since we live in CT, we went from heating our homes to blasting ACs within a single week. While we were digging through piles of clutter, forgotten toys, and outgrown clothes, I realized that we accomplished a lot this past winter, but at what cost? Furniture and holiday toys were built, the living room reorganized but messes were compartmentalized into out of sight, out of mind locales. While this tactic allowed us to get things done during an incredibly busy Winter (I was working overtime and taking difficult courses), we pushed other goals aside in a scrambled attempt to finish what we deemed as a priority.
Obviously it makes sense that I would approach programming the same as any challenge in my life. I am a logical person, often to a fault, so my logic applies to all aspects of my life. Unfortunately, my logic tends to over prioritize certain goals at the expense of others. This is why I am approaching graduation but feel woefully unprepared for interviews, since my immediate high-priority goal has been completing this program. While I have begun a mentality shift from academia to professional, I must also improve my approach to programming. Therefore, my methodology is on the list of critical improvements to be made before I begin interviewing.
