The story of a programmer.

Hello Habr!

Every day I read on your pages the stories of people, their problems and projects. And, in general, I see that most of them are successful and they like their work. I like it too, but today's date in my personal calendar makes me rethink what I've been doing all this time.

Today is a year, Habr, YEAR, as I develop a website for my company. And so far there has not been a single public release.
')

Prehistory

Tell us about yourself. I am 21, I work part-time, I came to the company more than 2 years ago for the position of an HTML layout designer, knowing some HTML and CSS and not knowing PHP at all. For that time, this knowledge turned out to be enough - both sites were completely static and all the work was to add new pages to them, and to edit old ones.

My acquaintance with PHP (I hadn’t done web programming before, I knew C / C ++ and picked Java a bit at my leisure) began with small scripts. I did it once, I did the second one, and the authorities began to move me in this direction, complicating the tasks. What I was, of course, very pleased. :) Having already reached the programmer level, I learned that the company had ordered an online store site from one web studio. This store, however, was taken over by management with serious flaws and glitches in general, and required processing by a file, what the invited “expert” was doing. True, he very quickly faded, despite a good salary, and the file was solemnly handed to me.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to dig deep into the store’s code, I did more about what could be called “front-end” - fixing buggy javascript, editing the design, organizing the process of buying a product, etc. In such mild conditions, I got acquainted in practice with PHP, SQL, XML, XSLT and, as they say, felt the Force in myself. :)

Breast on the embrasure

The shop was finished and released. Now he brings a steady income (although, in my opinion today, he is terrible). All this greatly inspired both myself and the management, who decided to get rid of the old static sites and create a completely new, modern, with an integrated store, newsletters and other buns. As the CMS, we chose Bitrix, whose representatives gave us a colorful presentation of the possibilities and ease of use. We were inspired even more ... And the failures went on.

1. No development plan. The seminar showed that creating a website on Bitrix is ​​really easy - there is a visual editor, ready-made components. It seemed that the fine-tuning required very small - to create pages with the necessary components, to correct templates for them - and here it is a product. Therefore, no one even thought to create a TK, because any idea is so easy to implement! The devil, as usual, was in the details. The flight of the bosses' imagination quickly went beyond the standard functionality of the components, but it was not clear how to implement one’s own, and what things might be needed at all. The first bumps flew into me: “How do you need to figure it out? It's so simple there! ”
2. Revaluation of forces. But here the first problems are overcome, the initial understanding of how the system works has come. Everything turned out to be quite logical, and I began to rise again. What I reported on, and it was decided to estimate in time how long it would take to create my product. Of course, everyone wanted to get ready quickly, and the terms were imposed on me short. And I, like a complete fool, succumbed, decided to just strut up and give out.
3. Weak research. The consequence of the above was, of course, the occurrence of stupid problems out of the blue - did not take into account here, did not take into account there, and as a result you get a crookedly working similarity plus a dead end in moving on. Each product can do something, something can not without outside interference in its code. What Bitrix could not do was taken into account by anyone, and haste did not give time to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the application to a specific site. I had to change the functionality of the components, and I was completely in a dark forest. At first, the code of a serious CMS turned out to be very, very complex for me, the comments in the code were completely missing or were very short, like “we use a cache here”.
4. Lack of motivation. Entirely my fault - the difficulties piled on me and I began to just “pull the strap”, not planning activities in advance, not analyzing the root causes of the problems, and just sitting with an empty look, flipping through kilometer files with component codes, silently listening to reproaches that yesterday the invented "small" feature has not yet been implemented.
   
   
   Now I am experiencing the rebirth of this project for myself. I figured out the old problems, I know how to understand the problems of the new ones, I try to think in detail what and how I will do. I actively argue my position to the authorities, explaining why, from their point of view, a trifle, like accepting credit cards, will not have to be realized for an hour or two. Mood fighting. :)
   
   But today's date made me think that before that I spent a whole YEAR doing garbage and wasted time.