For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an obsession with doing things the “right” way. I don’t like cutting corners because I believe—at my core—that doing things correctly the first time is so much more efficient than a more improvisational, trial and error technique.
I’m pretty sure this proclivity is why my skill set led me to a jack-of-all-trades style generalist end. If I don’t know how to do something I need to do, I learn not only the method to accomplish that task, but also the reasons behind the methodology. One might say that I am thorough.
I spent six years working in higher education and went so far as to earn a master’s degree just for fun (okay, not entirely for fun…but mostly). I’ve always had a penchant for learning things and it just seemed like what I should do.
Entering the workaday world from outside, however, has given me a unique perspective. I see a few troubling habits that are all too common in the workplace. Corners are cut regularly and mistakes are made often. Chewing gum is used to plug holes.
Sometimes it is just plain laziness that does it, but I think most times the real culprit is simply not knowing any better. And when both of these things collide, you get a real mess. But with so many knowledgeable people sharing their experiences online, there is really no excuse to keep working in ignorance, committing the same faults and mistakes time after time.
Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That
My time is expensive, and I’ll bet yours is too. So where do we find the minutes and hours we need to learn something new? The truth is, unless we feel it’s really important, we won’t make the time to integrate things into our workflows. I’ll be honest, I’ve been wanting to use LESS in my web projects, but it hasn’t felt important enough to me the set aside the hour or two I would need to fit it into how I work.
The culture we live in doesn’t really help support our good intentions, either. As Douglas Rushkoff puts it in his excellent book, Present Shock, we live in a “temporal limbo” where everything is happening at the same time.
Our phones are pushing us notifications, our clients are emailing us all the time. Friends and family have direct lines to you over chat, conversations are happening on Twitter and there’s always something new in the stream. There’s so much to pay attention to, we have to practically force the willpower through all the noise to carve out time for something new.
Perhaps a good place to find that willpower is in the assurance that our processes will be made more efficient, permanently, saving us a lot of time in the long-run.
“Why” Makes “How” Better
In 2007 I started a new job at a small liberal arts college just east of St. Louis. I was tasked with creating a small website so I needed to learn WordPress, and fast. So I looked for the most well-reputed designers and developers online and started reading their posts and watching their videos.
Through watching Chris Coyier’s early videocast on WordPress theme creation, I was able to create a theme the right way. And that little bit of effort has led to many opportunities professionally. Beyond that, it led me to want to do more complex things. And that meant hitting up the WordPress Codex to learn more about WordPress’s inner workings.
When I moved on to overseeing a few CMS migrations, I would always build into my training sessions a look at the underlying code. Too many times I would be called on to fix a formatting issue that was caused by something silly like pasting content directly into the editor from Microsoft Word. No matter how many times I would tell someone not to do it, it just wouldn’t sink in. It took me showing them the 700 lines of gobbledygook code—basically the “why” we don’t do this—to finally get it to click.
During the middle of 2013 I presented at WordCamp Austin and WP Summit on how designers can use jQuery in their WordPress themes. The hottest topic of the entire session revolved around using the `wp_register_script` and `wp_enqueue_script` hooks to tell WordPress to check whether or not jQuery had been loaded already. It seems to be fairly controversial because so many people have done it the wrong way for so long.
However, understanding why the right way is the right way makes all the difference. In this specific case, pasting the jQuery library code into your theme’s `header.php` file is a great way to cause conflicts with older versions of jQuery that a plugin might be loading in. This can cause all sorts of issues on the frontend and backend alike. In fact, there was a time when many people would recommend deregistering the version of jQuery shipped with WordPress and using the Google-hosted version of the library. But this doesn’t take into account backward or forward compatibility for the theme and again could lead to all sorts of conflicts.
After those two talks I had many people thank me for talking about the issue. It’s something that seems so small, yet many had never been given a case not to include jQuery this way, while others had been trying to convince their peers and colleagues of the reasons.
More times than not—whether it’s been something technical like code, or even something completely different like cooking, or something simple like not leaving the lights on all day and night because it wastes energy and makes your power bill go up—choosing to learn why something is done a certain way helps reinforce the behavior. If you don’t understand the “why” behind a task, you don’t have as much incentive to stick to a certain way of doing it.
So here are a couple of things you can learn about quickly to help in your day-to-day:
Design Basics
Did you know design is actually governed by a lot of rules? There are books and blogs posts and entire websites devoted to the hows and whys of design. Read a few of them.
Typography
Designlab
Universal Principles of Design
HTML & CSS
It’s one thing to read a blog post about HTML and CSS tricks. It’s another thing to understand why things work the way they do in code. If you take a bit of time to understand HTML basics, you’ll be able to fix your own layout problems a lot quicker than your dev (who, by the way, probably doesn’t appreciate those urgent emails) can get to them.
Codecademy
Treehouse
W3 Schools
Web Platform
Learning the “why” will make the “how” so much easier.
Joel G Goodman is a jack-of-all-trades marketer, designer, and front-end developer at his creative media agency, Bravery Transmedia. He has been designing and developing websites for bands, universities, bakeries, bloggers, professionals, and startups since 2007 and holds a master of arts degree in Media Studies from The New School for Public Engagement. Joel lives in Austin, TX where the sun shines warmly and the tacos never run out.
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