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just in time knowledge
Thursday, September 20 2018
Today was yet another day of not having any assigned work, so I thought I'd up my Angular game. Using a tutorial that demonstrated how to build a simple web app that accesses a Django backend, I tweaked it so that it could instead talk to another existing backend I already have, and before long I had it displaying lists of items as well as individual items. I found as I worked that many of the things in the framework were confusing or opaque, but it hardly mattered. I knew where to apply myself based on the example of the demo, and the answers to any additional questions (such as how to grab and pass IDs from the query string) were easily found with Google searches. With such complicated technology, I find that it's best not to get bogged down in the jargon (such as "what is a decorator?" and "what is injection?") and focus on what needs to be known to accomplish what needs to be accomplished. It's possible to do things the "wrong" way when working this way, but all of that can be fixed later once the paradigm is closer to being mastered. Focusing just on what needs to be known as it needs to be known (or "just-in-time knowledge") makes it possible to work effectively in very alien environments, drawing mostly on the patterns one has encountered earlier in a career. This style of working has served me well, starting way back in the early 1990s when I used to reverse engineer and patch 680x0 applications knowing only the IDs of unwanted dialogs and having only a general sense of how assembly language worked (that is, not specific knowledge about 680x0 processors). Remember, that was in the days before web searches, when I had to figure things out using just what I had in front of me.
In this new workplace, there is such a dizzying (and somewhat dispiriting) diversity of technology, much of it built by people who have come and gone, that I may well come to be the point person on a lot of code that others will never be able to understand simply because most people do not feel confident wading into technology they don't completely understand.
For lunch today I had leftover pasta with red sauce from last night.
Southbound traffic on US 209 west of 9W was terribly slow, perhaps because it coincided with the end of the day on the bridge replacement worksite (assuming that project doesn't continue 24 hours a day). I was in the left lane in a place beyond where signs had said the right lane was closing. But still there were many cars in that right lane, and these people seemed to be merging at about the same rate as traffic was flowing through the job site, meaning the right lane wasn't moving at all (at least not for a time). That was my theory as I sat there with nothing else to do, curious about what things conspire to completely freeze traffic upstream from a place that has a known traffic flow rate of greater than zero. The only thing I could think of was that merging traffic from other lanes used all the capacity of the bottleneck up ahead.
There did end up being a diaspora happy hour tonight, though again it was just us three who were fired on that fateful day ("Bloody Thursday") back in June. The happy hour began with just me and Dan, and I wanted his advice on how to proceed in the weird environment of my new workplace. I told him about the weird absence of any sort of workplace culture, something I might want to fix down the road (but not immediately). I also asked how best to proceed when I'm sitting at my desk with nothing obvious to do. I'm of the opinion that one should never ask for work, but so early in a job it's hard even to find self-directed projects that make sense (although brushing up on my Angular skills is a great use of my time, especially given the company's plans to start building things in Angular). Dan thought it probably made sense for me to actually ask for work in this situation. Ultimately, the people paying my paycheck want to be getting value for their money. As for Dan, he's yet to land a job since Bloody Thursday, though it hardly matters given the great job his wife has in the solar energy sector. Dan's freedom has him thinking about perhaps starting his own business, though what exactly that would be seemes to change a little every time we talk about it.
Later Allison joined happy hour and we all discussed various pieces of Mercy For Animals gossip that Dan was privy too. It seems factions friendlier to our viewpoint are ascendant at Mercy For Animals, and it's caused some tense moments in various Los-Angeles-area vegan restaurants when members of both factions have shown up at the same time. Then, of course, there are people who are trying to get along with people from both factions, and their balancing act can be mortifying in its own way. All these sorts of things have played out before here on the East Coast with our various animal rights organizations (mostly farmed animal sanctuaries), with abusive founders, alienated board members, and the many trying to stay above the frays. It gets complicated! For example, Gretchen is an aggrieved party (and former board member) with respect to Catskill Animal Sanctuary and is not on speaking terms with its founder, but she tried to stay above the fray with Woodstock Farm Sanctuary. More recently, though, she's learned things about the new WFS management that has made her into an anti-WFS partisan.
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