At work for the last couple of weeks a coworker has been working very hard to design a custom framework for the web based application that we all develop for and support. This is no simple task seeing that the application currently is the epitomy and definition, if you will, of “spagehtti” code… over 1,000 files worth. Although I am consulting on the project he is doing most of the programming.

On top of this I have started up an initiative at work to start doing the weekly development meetings… leading those up essentially. Part of these meetings involves presenting on some type of technology, or software design issue, or challenge.

I presentedin the last meeting, and my coworker was to do this one. On what? This new framework. Let’s look at the first problem. A number of the developers on our team have never had much exposure to frameworks, let alone OOP development, and we JUST covered OOP 101 last week. So sadly my coworker was tasked with presenting something that was “doomed” to be too high level at this point. And that’s what happened. The good news here is that we did indeed learn that we need to step back a couple of paces, and make sure that everyone is educated on the concepts of OOP and frameworks prior to getting them involved in ours.

Another issue I’m running into is that I’m finding it challenging to educate developerson company time. To get all these things they would have to learn about a lot of this on personal time. Hands-on practice. How does one get the average adult, with lives and kids, to devote personal time to learning something that the company may or may not be moving towards? A challenge indeed.