Yesterday I spent almost three hours building a feature (capital-F Feature for the Drupal folx). Headphones on, not my hope + defiance playlist, but a Baroque music channel. Arranging all the little fiddly things, creating new repository branches, cross-checking settings. I spent a good long time on the same sort of work today. It’s very solitary and immersive. I tend to lose track of time (and food) entirely.
Last week I ran a content strategy meeting, which I haven’t really done in months. It’s not the same sort of lost-time-flow work, but it was some of my favorite clients trying to figure out how to update their content after some internal changes. They were really engaged, and sometimes it was just a matter of listening intently while they worked out their own things.
That same day, Justin and I had a working meeting to figure out what we need to do differently in our process, now that The Big Project is live in the wild. We had a lot of hand-waving, half-sentences, writing on the big whiteboard. I think we came up with some good ideas…some of which is what I was working on yesterday.
This morning, our tiny team met to talk through upcoming usability testing. Together we looked at some notes from the client, cross-checked them against the goals for the piece, reviewed the scenario and tasks. I edited a few bits on the fly, just cleaning up wording, rearranging sections, finding a little better way to say the thing that needs to be said.
It’s been almost five years since I gave up being a generalist, a web manager, a webmaster. But I still haven’t given up being a jack-of-all-trades in my heart, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
