I am working on a new feature for one of our microservices. It’s about a medium-sized T-shirt that involves working with AngularJS’s ui-router, working with new API endpoints, and writing some CSS from scratch. I’m excited! And a little daunted…
To work against being overwhelmed and becoming unproductive, I focused on tackling the hardest part first – the routing and views. I knew that I was going to work with ui-router, so I read through a few tutorials and brushed up on routing in AngularJS.
I then put together quickly some mock views to connect to the new states and routes. This felt better than starting to code markup and styling, I had to remove the unknown first.
The tutorials only got me so far, so I stopped and thought about it. I did some searches on Google. After a few iterations on this cycle, I reached out to a coworker. Instead of telling him it’s broke give me the codes!, I explained what I had done, what I was trying to achieve, and what wasn’t happening as I expected. Rather than him coming to help me google, it turned into a discussion about patterns, structuring code, and a brief pair-programming to get something working quickly. I even got some praise that my initial concept is good and that I should just find the right balance, between sound design and time spent on the solution.
I thought of this article after the whole discussion with my coworker.
