Reality is messy

We like to believe that the right framework, method, approach, or conventions will allow us to create perfect projects. Our code will be beautiful, pure, performant, and maintainable. Outside of some developer blogs however, this is often not the case.

Reality is messy.

Some people are fortunate enough not to have to deal with this reality on a daily basis. There are people who work for browser-makers. Their projects are not most projects. There are people who work for large-scale and popular “startups”, who have the luxury of focusing on a limited number of components. Their projects are not most projects. Although we can (and do) learn a lot from posts on Medium about month-long experiments in link underlining, many of us have pressing deadlines. Processes can be messy because they involve other people and limited resources, tight budgets, difficult stakeholders and ridiculous time constraints.

Outside of the product world, many of us work in creative and/or technical services. Our job is to help our clients. These clients have concerns during the design and development process that we need to address. Sometimes, we can’t do everything exactly as we would like. Client needs trump our own.

I’ll give you an example: a project I worked on where my job was to help take an existing desktop-centric design and make it responsive. My task was to determine exactly how everything would work responsively. My deliverable was a series of more than 20 design comps built with HTML and CSS. The comps were themselves responsive, so stakeholders and the developers knew what the end result should be.

Here’s the thing: there were extreme time constraints. We basically had two months to get this fairly complex website responsive. In order to do this, the developer would change as little HTML as possible, as this would mean rewriting components all over the place. Yes, we wanted to see that happen, but it wasn’t feasible. So I used the existing HTML whenever possible, and I cringed while doing it, because holy shit, this HTML (with all due respect to the developers; you know CMSes). But it was practical and allowed the developer to reuse a lot of my CSS. Which was a lot more CSS than I would have had to write if I were able to rewrite the HTML.

Could I have said no? Sure, but I wouldn’t have been helping anyone, least of all myself, by doing so. This client has interesting challenges, and I wasn’t willing to just say no to four months of work with them because of a tight deadline.

Another issue I had to deal with was working in weekly (!) sprints. Coming up with responsive strategies for each component of certain screen types and then prototyping them in one week was not easy. In order to do it without creating conflicts and still get things done on time, I had to namespace each logical group of components, like this:

.product {
  /* Styles, including media queries, here. */
}

.account {
  /* Same idea, different logical group */
}

While doing this for each round of logical prototype groups allowed me to avoid conflicts with prototypes I had done or those I would do in future sprints, it made me repeat myself across those blocks, since I had literally no time to constantly refactor. And it was not my job to create the front-end code, though I knew the developer was using and altering snippets from my CSS to save time. Result: my comps had way too much CSS.

Could I have an approach like BEM? Yes, I could have. But since some CSS methodologies eschew inheritance, I lose a huge time benefit. And remember, HTML changes were required to be minimal, and that’s not feasible when choosing a CSS approach that involves moving the dirty work into class attributes.

What’s your goal?

In the project above, the thing that kept me sane was focusing on the specific reason I was asked to join the project: to decide how everything should look and work responsively, and to visualize this for stakeholders and the developers, in such a way that they could actually experience it on actual devices so that it is clear what needs to be done.

That had to be my focus.

We finished the work in two months with just a few people. And a phase two was planned to go in and refactor, to improve lots of things, including performance. That’s the right time for optimizing HTML and CSS, and improving things like performance. Ideal? Certainly not. Realistic based on the needs of the client? Absolutely. This particular client sees their website (100% of their revenue comes from the website) as a process rather than a product. I think that’s a healthy way of looking at things. It means they have a responsive site, built within two months time, that customers could enjoy right away. That site, even with sub-optimal HTML and CSS, performed twice as well as the previous desktop version. Customers don’t care about what the source looks like, and phase two, almost underway, is intended for code optimization and other quality improvements.

Messy, isn’t it? It certainly is. But really, it’s often the reality of a service business. It’s natural to try and find processes or approaches that work for every project, but you won’t. And they don’t. Embracing this fact is one step toward pleasing clients, and also helps deal with the frustration that we can’t always make everything as perfect as we’d like it to be. Of course, that shouldn’t keep us from trying.

I start every project with a lofty goal of achieving perfection. I’ve never reached it. I make mistakes all the time. I look back and immediately see things I would have done differently. I try to learn from those mistakes. I try to remember that making those mistakes and dealing with the messy reality of the work, while still trying to do my best work, puts me on a path of constant improvement.

We need to give ourselves a break. I hope I’m learning more and becoming just slightly better every day. I hope you are, too. In our line of work, where everything moves so quickly, that’s something to be happy about.

Here’s to a better imperfect year than the last one.