I remember when I was working for a healthcare IT company, and I proposed making a ‘textbook’ for our customers to print out and keep handy for times when they needed help figuring something out in our app. The response I got was akin to Egon Spengler’s iconic line, “print is dead”.
A little over a year later, I decided to make a small booklet for my own implementation client because I knew they would find it useful, even if I couldn’t get buy-in from the rest of the company. Before long, all of our Implementation Consultants were using them, as were our Client Services colleagues. It wasn’t long before I got to create that textbook after all, and last I heard, the company is still using a good portion of the materials I created for print. Print may be dead, but ink and paper are still technologies that people feel comfortable with, and which really help us learn in a different way than just consuming words on a screen.
Tonight, I took the code from my recently-completed Quote app and went through and annotated the different parts of the code to help myself understand better how all the different pieces fit together. I even found out that one of my files was not actually contributing to the main app, and worked out how to fix it so that my app now meets all of the requirements of the assignment. It may hearken back to a less technologically-advanced time (and an age where learning with colorful markers is considered more normal), but it sure helped me make better sense of my own work so that I’ll be writing my next project with a stronger understanding!