Brief Thought #4: Technical Skills and Productivity

I have found that when I attempt to do something very difficult, it often leads me to an epiphany of innovation and invention. There are always ways to make difficult tasks easy, and if a way doesn’t exist now, it will as soon as enough people face the problem and decide to invent a solution. Sometimes I am driven to a completely new and unique solution (new invention) which nobody has used before. But often I simply discover something which other people already know and is new to me. In either case, the key point is this: I don’t discover or invent the solution until I try to do something that is so hard that it is overwhelming. In other words, when I most need a productivity boost.

Examples:

Cataloging YHWH’s Laws: I first started doing this pretty much by hand, reading through a hard copy of the Bible, with a hard copy of Strong’s Concordance nearby, and writing notes by hand. Going through the first five books of the Bible this way was arduous and time consuming. Going through the rest of the Bible this way would be a life’s work. Just thinking about the problem made me start using a spreadsheet to speed up the work. It still requires a lot of human attention and judgment calls about what should go where in the catalog, but the spreadsheet does all of the “busy work” of sorting things according to pre-set criteria and grouping things together. For the most part, all I have to do is make decisions about how it all should be sorted. That does take a little bit of time, and the decisions have to be based on a careful understanding of the text and the context.

Managing Style Elements: When I first set up this website, I used Microsoft FrontPage. It provided a visual interface to design the pages, and it inserted the code to make everything appear on the web the way it appeared on the screen. Later, I wanted to be able to change a few things in the formatting. For instance, paragraph indenting. Sounds simple, right? But it involves adding the indent code to every paragraph of every page on the website. A million monkeys would have trouble with that task. Then, voila! The solution presented itself in the form of CSS cascading style sheets. One file holds all the formatting information for the website, including paragraph indents, and even more things I didn’t dream of seven years ago like positioning elements on the page. Learning the technical skill of programming in CSS made an impossible job easy. It was as if I could step into a time machine, work on the formatting for ten years, and then come back and see it all done a few minutes after I started. Better, it saved me ten years of boredom doing repetitive hand-coding.

Bulk Replacing of Text: About a month ago I decided to do something very very hard. I took a stock html version of the King James Bible and re-formatted the entire thing and put it up on the website. There are 1189 chapters in the Bible. Each chapter has its own html page. I didn’t like the original formatting. Again, redoing 1189 pages would be a life’s work, if done by hand. Then I discovered bulk text-editing programs, and by spending a few minutes learning how to use one popular free program, I was able to change all 1189 pages in one or two nights, test them, and upload them to the web.

Content Management: I learned that my bulk text-editing program has a limitation. In Linux, the function for replacing text with line breaks in it doesn’t work. At least on my machine, your mileage may vary. If you want to find parts of the text with multiple lines, and then replace them with anything else, you have to do it one line at a time. Another limitation or bug was that in one of my operations, it inserted mysterious line breaks (double-spacing) into some of the code. Since that code contains multiple lines, I can’t simply use the program to undo its mistake. It has to be done by hand. On 1189 pages. Surely there’s an easier way?

There is an easier way, and it is called PHP. It is the language that powers this blog in Wordpress. It does for content what CSS does for formatting and style. Instead of pasting repetitive content like headers and sidebars and footers in every page of the website, it puts each element in its own single file, and then you write an index file which calls all of the elements together according to your programmed layout, and builds the html page when it is requested. Cool? Sure. Instead of having 1189 static html pages to contend with and change every time I want to edit the layout our sidebars in the Bible, there is only one index file, plus a file for each recurring element. Changing the navigation sidebar for all 1189 pages then requires only changing the one file, sidebar.php.

I am over half-way done changing the coding the hard way for the 1189 Bible pages. It’s a ten-hour job, and I have completed six hours of it. That is all it took to convince me that I need to learn the better way. I have begun the process of learning to build a PHP based website. It is one more language to learn, and it will take some time, but when I finish, it will be well worth it. Then the entire website will function as efficiently and elegantly as the Wordpress blog portion of the site. That is, of course, if YHWH blesses the effort! If successful, it will make the management of the site almost elementary. It will be possible to manage 10,000 pages as easily as it is to handle 1,000 now. Changing elements in all the pages will take minutes instead of weeks.

Conclusion

No matter what field you’re in, the best way to give yourself an hourly raise is to increase your technical skills and thereby increase your productivity. If you are paid $10.00 to do a job, find a way to do it in a minute instead of an hour. Whether it means using more powerful tools, or powerfully managing human resources (including your own), this will make a huge difference. I can only imagine how much new useful content this site would have if I took all the hours spent on code cleanup and used it for writing, cataloging, and compiling useful information instead. This just restates the premise: necessity is the mother of invention, and the surest path to innovation involves trying to accomplish something which is time- or cost-prohibitive without the innovation. Ultimately all these little innovations add up to a higher quality of life for yourself and the people you serve.