I’ve never had the time, and when I’ve had the time I’ve never had the money, to sit down and properly learn pretty much anything that would qualify as the criteria you’d use to call yourself a developer. Learning code has always been one of those “I’ll get to it when I have free time” type deals that, well, never ended up materializing because I never ended up having free time. Welp, I still don’t have much in the way of free time, but now I can at least mess with some of the tools the code junkies make regular use of.
We’re doing a pretty significant reorg of some of our internal processes, and that includes some of our internal training–well, most of it, really. And since I’m part of that project, I immediately glommed on to what you might call a bit of a tangle. It’s no secret I work for the WordPress people, so it should be no surprise that much of our documentation happens in a thing based on WordPress. Good idea, except for the parts that aren’t.
I’m a fan of letting the things that are good at doing stuff do that stuff. WordPress is an amazing communication tool. But projects and issues aren’t a thing it can do. GitHub, on the other hand, pretty much makes that its bread and butter. So where a primary use might be for, say, developing a WordPress plugin, we’re co-opting parts of it for our own undesirable uses. Project tracking and routine maintenance.
This means I get to play around with automation and try to see what I can break in the span of a week. And, since my coworkers have a bunch of premade automations I can probably punk to fill a hole, and since my very first college Linux prof’s rule number 2 (*) was “work smarter, not harder”, I figure that’ll get me started while I wrap my head around YML–has it really been 10 years since I touched YML? Jesus. I said I like a challenge, but I really need to do better with picking them.
Sure, what I’m going with is probably overkill for what problem I’m trying to solve. But, the problem will be solved, and if 3 more come up I’ll probably have the equipment left over. If absolutely nothing else, I get to pretend like I’m an actual developer for a while. And, I mean, that can almost never go wrong. Except when it does. But it’s not like I’m pretending to develop a Twitter client for blind people (**).
(*): My prof’s rule number 1 was “read all the words”. To this day I’m surprised how many people… didn’t–we lost marks for that. Yes, even on the final exam. Especially on the final exam.
(**): We technically just renamed a couple of variables and maybe added a few shortcuts that didn’t exist previously, but for the most part it was basically just a repackaged/repurposed version of an actual Twitter client for blind people. And we mostly did it because we thought we were hot shit. God I wish someone had slapped me. We were many things. Mostly immature. Definitely not developers.