Wednesday, October 8, 2014

MakerSquare Day 30: Quiet room, loud room (7/2)

Instead of one big room like our Brazos office, the Congress office is, well, one big main room, but with a few smaller rooms coming off of it: we have our own kitchen, a little tv room area, and the Quiet Room.

I'm not sure it's actually capitalized like that, but as a long-time reader of horror, I like it with a hint of sinister. Though it's really not sinister; it used to be the tv room, where people would play Super Smash Bros. and other games from long ago.

But now it's the Quiet Room, where people can go to get away from the hubbub of the main room to get some work done.

I tried it out yesterday when we were continuing on our single-page-application project: a quiz purely written in JavaScript. It wasn't bad. (The room, I mean. My quiz page is also pretty nice, which brings up another issue we should talk about: front-end vs. back-end work.)

But the Quiet Room wasn't quite the productivity silver-bullet that it might sound like. Sure, I could get some reading done in there, but there were a couple of times where I wanted to talk to someone about what I was trying to do or see what they were trying to do.

I was reminded of (I'm always reminded of something) the title of a book about the culture of the Jewish shtetl that I read in college: Life Is With People. Except if I were writing a book about MakerSquare (and coding more generally), I'd title it Work is With People.

It's like what I learned about the culture of creative writing and really successful writers over the last few years: you may do some really great work by yourself, but what really makes it both possible and worthwhile is bringing your writing (fiction or code) to the group, either to get corrected or to show what you learned or just to share.

So maybe I'll leave the Quiet Room for the ghosts that surely inhabit it. I mean, a lot of Super Smash Bros. died in that room.

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