When I was seventeen years old, I made the decision to join the U.S. Army Reserves. It wasn’t really a hard choice to make, considering the number of family members that have been in the military at one time or another. When I enlisted, I had to choose what job (my M.O.S. or Military Occupation Specialty) I would go to training for. I had a few good options, but one naturally stood out to me: Food Service Specialist, the glorified Military name for Cook. It was a natural choice for me because I grew up in a Spanish home where Mom did the cooking and taught me all the family recipes.
Now most people have a fairly negative perspective of what a cook does in the Military. One might picture me peeling potatoes all day and cooking some mush that passed as an excuse for food. However, when I went to cook school in Ft. Lee, Virginia, we were taught the ins and outs of the kitchen, proper cutting techniques (you know, so you don’t lose a finger), and of course, we learned some delicious recipes.
Cooking has taught me a lot about professionalism and attention to detail. So, how do I apply those techniques as a web developer? Let me share. When you cook a nice meal (and I’m not talking about out-of-the-box Mac & Cheese, I mean a full course meal with all the trimmings) you have to prepare and have all your materials in place. Sometimes this requires that you go shopping in the morning for all your ingredients. Whether it’s a new design or marking up a new website layout, you have to do a little research in order to know the full outcome of the product. I like to gather my ingredients by meeting with the client — or in my case at Pop Labs, meeting with the Project Coordinator — about what functionality a website needs to have in place. It’s important to know any variables ahead of time so you’re not wasting time making it up as you go.
So, you have your ingredients or research done…now what? Wash your hands! No one wants germs in their food. Now, put on your apron and start with a clean work area, or a framework, and start slicing and dicing. Most follow recipes to the letter, and this is good practice for novice chefs; however, once you’ve become more accustomed to your work area, it’s a good idea to improvise and experiment. We have a particular client that has officially become my “sandbox” of new techniques. I get to play in my sandbox and build castles and then smash them if they don’t work (it’s quite fun). Same thing with cooking. You can stick to your favorite recipe, but then it might become dull and you’ll want to spice it up. The end result may turn out awesome, or it might taste like dog food. In that case, just go back to what works and come back to that experiment and tweak it to taste. Half the fun in cooking is improvising, which can be true for marketing, design, whatever your forte.
Once you’ve fine tuned your skills, you can start creating your own recipes or applications for your dinner guests/clients. It’s good to have a foundation to build upon, but without those foundations, you’re really just throwing everything in a pot and calling it gourmet meal. Sometimes out-of-the-box Mac & Cheese is what you have to provide, depending on budgets and other factors out of your control, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be an interesting new recipe. Do what I do – add some cut up hot dogs! Yum.
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