Today, we’ll take a little detour on our fantasyland adventure to talk about something that people, including myself, constantly forget.
There’s no such thing as a simple problem. But some appear that way because of the work of others.
I call this the walking the paved road. We take a lot of things for granted while we work, because they’re just there. And then we sometimes take it one step further and say things like “it’s simple, you just…”. We forget when things weren’t simple. When we were just learning and stuff didn’t just work. And then when we teach someone else, we can’t walk the metaphorical mile in their shoes and understand where their frustration is coming from.
Today I setup my first CI pipeline, and it was a breeze. Everything worked, and life was full of rainbows 🌈. It was when I caught myself thinking “well, that was easy, I don’t know why people complain so much about this” that I realized something: it was only easy for me because Uğurcan had already paved the road before. I had heard him talk about issues he was solving while setting up the CI server and didn’t stop to think that every one of those solutions was already in place for my enjoyment.
We need to appreciate the work of others more, and stop taking things for granted. We’re very good at complaining about things when something goes wrong, but not as good at appreciating the work put into those things. My new plan is to appreciate someone else’s work once a day. Today, it was Uğurcan who did an amazing work setting up that CI server, so that it would be “easy” for me to use.
Never forget the times when things were hard and frustrating. Then we’ll stop belittling people who don’t get something we take for granted and appreciate the work done by others to make our collective lives easier.