A friendly framework reminder

Quite often at work, I find myself reminding my team members to be sure to ALWAYS utilize the framework to it’s fullest.  Just because you are unsure how to do something or have never done it before in the framework, does NOT mean that it cannot be done!

I use to have this thinking as well.  I would curse and curse, I’ve done this a 100 times, why is it so difficult to do with this framework!

Once I calmed down, I would Google it or look around the documentation and pretty quickly discover how to accomplish it using the framework.  9 times out of 10, I found that it was actually extremely easy to implement.  Not only that, 7 or 8 times out of 10, it would actually save me time!  If it didn’t the first time, it certainly always saved me a lot more the next time.

In actuality, this is one of the reasons I started to blog.  Every time I’m at work and accomplish something that I haven’t done before or learned a new little trick, I will send myself an email reminding me to blog about it later.  I don’t always get to it right away, but I try as soon as I can so I don’t forget!

The fact that my team members still need coaching on a regular basis, I thought I would write a brief article about it to encourage everyone else.

Something that will help you remember and provide you a lot of useful information is to maintain a document or “knowledge base” of code snippets that you’ve used.

The most important things to capture are the following:

• Brief title describing what it is
• Brief description of how you used it, if it’s obvious this can be optional
• Example code
• Example output, again another optional one, but could be useful for things difficult to explain
• Where you used it

The last item is something we often omit, when in reality it can be the most important one.  I don’t know about you, but many times I remember myself saying, “Oh yeah, I’ve done that before on…” and I draw a blank as to where it was.  I will often remember, but it would be a lot easier to write it down in an organized fashion and not worry about it again.  I have enough on my mind, I don’t need to remember where I’ve done every neat, little piece of code too!

If you have some ideas to help encourage people to use a framework to it’s fullest, feel free to share, I always love hearing other people’s opinions and success stories.