It took me 18 hours to make the first version of the Census Crunch, and if you’ve taken a look to the time tracking breakdown, you may have noticed that one of the longest items to make was the pagination controls at the end of the list. One hour fifty-three minutes.
This wasn’t in order to create the pagination functionality. The pagination functionality was already there. It was showing only up to 100 entries per page, and you could append “&page=3” to the URL and go to page 3. It took one hour fifty-three minutes just to create the controls in the UI. In comparison to the other things, this seems too much. Could the total 18 hours be an exaggeration?
One part of the answer is that, for various technical reasons, it’s not that simple. But the main reasons are these:
- I’m not that good in the UI.
- Somehow, despite having written many programs in the last 25 years, I had never done this before. I didn’t have code that I could copy. I had to figure it out from scratch.
Does this mean I’m incompetent? With respect to pagination controls, perhaps I am (or I was). But every developer has strengths and weaknesses. Every developer, when doing something, will deal with things he’s good at and with things he’s not good at. Every developer working on a project does things he’s done before and things he’s never done before.
In any project, a developer will be able to do wonders in minutes, and sometimes get stuck for hours while trying to change a comma.