Robert on Software Development

There’s a term that comes from online games known as grinding. This term is used to describe a repetitive activity intended to accomplish some goal. For example, you might find yourself repeatedly killing a certain type of creature in the hopes that it’ll give you a particular piece of loot. That’s grinding.

The point of bringing that up is to say that I feel like I’ve been grinding a lot on a particular task at work. It seems like a pretty simple task, involving SharePoint document libraries and Word documents, but something about the whole thing just isn’t sitting right. Not yet. I’ve spent a lot of time on my whiteboard, mapping things out. Each time I’ve come up with a solution, I go into SharePoint and figure out why it won’t work. Content query web part? Nope. Document library web part with querystring filter? Nope. Individual libraries for each user group? Nope.

And so on, and on, and on, until the end of the day comes and I throw my hands up in the air in defeat as I trudge out to my Jeep for my mercifully short commute home through downtown Des Moines. Yet I still have the specter of the problem hanging over me, taunting me, urging me to just stay in bed and pull the comforter over my head until SharePoint somehow magically solves itself.

As a grown up, I have figured out that such solutions aren’t really solutions at all, and I do indeed have to face the music, so to speak. The first step to overcoming the demon is to admit that I am the one with the problem: my skills in this particular area aren’t strong enough, so perhaps I can’t figure this one out on my own.

Tomorrow I’m bringing in another set of eyes to work on the problem with me. Hopefully we can collaborate effectively and devise some kind of solution that will solve the problem without taking forever to implement. This guy’s SharePoint knowledge is next to nil, but he’s a smart developer so maybe just talking about the problem will give me the eureka moment.

I’ll let you know.