Gardening

What do I do now?

I’ve set a one hour timer. I decided to give myself some time this weekend to begin gardening. I mean that both literally and metaphorically. You are probably familiar with literal gardening, so I’ll spare you most of the details about that. I want to talk about what I mean by metaphorical gardening.

I recently started reading designer Frank Chimero’s amazing blog. Over the last months, he has ripped his very nice website apart to its bare bones and started using it as a simple blog where he is walking himself and the reader through his plans on redesigning his website as he does it. I found a lot of his writing both thought-provoking and inspiring. It made me think a lot about things that have been bugging me for the last couple of years in my own professional life and introduced a new paradigm that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Gardening vs. Architecture

Somewhere along Chimero’s writing (you’ll have to find this yourself, no time for finding links), he mentioned that he sees two different types of projects that call for two different approaches. On the one hand you have the first, and more traditional, type of project that I assume we all think about when we think of projects. This first type of project requires planning, some sort of a blueprint and most importantly a defined process. A good example for an architectural type of project is building a bridge.

When we build bridges, we architect them first. We try to calculate most of the project requirements before implementing the bridge, since this will dictate much of our approach. In this case, the requirements for the project are highly discoverable before we implement and will make our implementation much easier. We can find out how long the bridge needs to be, how much weight it needs to hold, what materials we will need to source and what tasks need to be completed to get the bridge done on schedule. There is a lot of great writing about how to approach this type of project so I won’t bore you with more details. Let’s talk about the second type of project.

Starting to garden

I recently moved to a new house with my girlfriend. We have a great spacious backyard now, but it hasn’t been well kept. We have weeds everywhere and plants that we don’t want, but a lot of what’s there is absolutely beautiful. Neither of us have much experience in gardening and we’re not exactly sure how to approach it.

Since we can’t leave the house because of the coronavirus lockdown, we’ve suddenly found ourselves with a lot of time for house keeping and we knew that setting up a nice garden for this summer would be a great priority. We decided to just start without much of a plan and just pull out weeds and things that should clearly not be there. Over the next few weeks, we’ve been digging, uprooting and cutting much of the excess growth without too much of a game plan at this stage. But we’ve found that as we get the first thing that should obviously be addressed, the next few things that need attention start sticking out a lot more clearly.

This is what Chimero was talking about when he referenced that second type of project. Gardening projects.

Some type of work isn’t fit to be tackled by architecting a process beforehand. Sometimes there is just too much of a mess. Too many unknowns and a blockers at every turn. We can try to have some super agile processes that embrace these unknowns, but that’s still a defined process that I find ends up bugging me down every time. A few examples of gardening-type projects that I’m dealing with at work right now:

• Refactoring code
• Establishing a design system
• Establishing new patterns
• Polishing UX and UI design

I think these type of projects are often held back by process rather than aided. Like Chimero suggests, we should go about these tasks much like we go about gardening. Just get in there and start picking out the weeds. Tend to the project. Give it your time and care and you will find what it needs. When you find something, you don’t put it on a ticket. You just do it. And you keep doing that every day.

The theoretical vs. the practical

I have a complicated relationship with writing about my work. I find that theoretical talk, as good as it can be, can also be sickening. I’m tired of reading design articles lately. I feel like most of them are written by people so infatuated with career and self development that they are practicing self-development for self-development’s sake. Like a gym rat that started out with a goal of achieving a healthier and more balanced lifestyle becomes so obsessive about making gains that they become the most opposite of balanced. We find theoretical guiding principals that are supposed to help us in a practical way, but we become so enamored with the principles that we will follow them religiously even when they are no longer applied in a practical way.

So with that out of the way, I acknowledge I have been writing for the past 40 minutes about something completely in the theoretical realm. I want to be done with that. Theory should be thought of as a toolbox, which you only reach for when you’re stuck or have a problem. I want to focus on the pragmatical tasks that need to get done. And I want to garden. In my professional life, that is.

I don’t want to write about theoretical BS. I want to do shit. And while I’m at it, I want to self-document it so anyone can see me do it as I go.

Picking out the weeds

So thinking about gardening, let’s start picking out the weeds. When I look at the garden that is my professional life, these are things I see that I don’t like:

• Lethargy
• Cynicism
• Focus on other things I get more pleasure out of
• I feel like a tired old dog
• Disillusioned with self-development
• Disillusioned with web-development

More practical weeds

Damn, I really am having a hard time sticking to practical stuff. None of that felt practical. I want to start by making a better website for my personal portfolio. These are the weeds I see there:

• Old packages that are out of date
• Can’t even run the app locally right now because of issues
• Too complex
• Uses Angular, I rather use React now
• I’m concerned that 6 months from now, it will get so far out of date that it will be completely unusable anymore

So that’s my garden with all of its nasty weeds. But this tie I’m not going to make a big plan of attack. I’m just going to sit there and tend to it every week. I’m starting by writing my thoughts here on Medium. Like Chimero, my next step will be to make my website into a place where I can blog. I’ll deal with whatever needs to be dealt with when the time comes. For now, I’m going to make more of a mess before things start looking better.

If you want to find more about my journey making my new website, follow me on Medium. I don’t think I care about anyone reading this, but it will definitely raise the stakes for me and make me follow up on this if I know there are some lovely people reading this that don’t want to disappoint.

Next up

I’ll be setting up a starter website using Gatsby. I’ll talk about my experience with it, a website I recently designed and how I like to set up some things to start on a good path including CSS Modules, a reusable CSS grid, color palettes and fonts. See ya later.