Early Bird Bird Gets the Worm, But The Second Mouse Gets The Cheese.

This week was rocky for sure, and almost completely reaffirmed the old adage: “the early bird gets the worm”. At first we had a delayed meeting due to everyone’s time constraints, then it was digging through prior projects in a shared folder to figure out what was done and what needed to be done. We were heading towards the end of January and yet I was still figuring out what was the last thing someone built for the Craft Center.

I had assumed the old project was a Node.js website with a MySQL database, all run locally. I thought it was more complex than it needed to be, and so, I was determined to rewrite the database part while only adapting the frontend. Luckily for me, before I could start, I was able to get in touch with the real prior team and their work. Their project had more in common with what I had imaged in my minds eye and therefore, I no longer needed to forge the same path.

This experience showed me that I needed to be an “early bird” when it came to communicating with stakeholders and prior contributors, that sort of thing cannot be put off. Ignorance can only be overcome by being proactive with your search for knowledge. Work on the other hand, needs time, even when under pressure. It is best to wait breaking ground until you have a complete picture of what was done before, ignoring this, you risk falling into the same traps as those before you. When doing work, then, I needed to be the “second mouse”, that meant waiting until I had looked at all the prior work, before acting.

This was a useful experience, as I hadn’t had confronted something like this from either a professional or academic setting. Normally, someone sticks around to help with transitions or explain prior work, but I’m sure things in software development move differently. Projects could be restarted without the old team still there or outsourced companies could be working on software developed by another group entirely. In short, these lessons will help me with future situations where transitions are choppy and knowing where things stand take some investigating.