Matthew Knott

I look at others in this industry and love their enthusiasm for learning, innovation and technology.

I feel really enthusiastic myself but loose so much of that when I get to work, and I wonder if that's because I'm the tip of the sword, not the wielder, and is it possible to be both?

Working with SharePoint in education, I come across a lot of enthusiastic people who are really fired up about what they 're doing. A prime example of thi s being Mike Herrity from Twynham School (@MikeHerrity on twitter), someone who is passionate about both SharePoint and Education, and uses the two to innovate and come up with ideas that will physically evolve learning, and how teachers, students and parents interact with ICT and each other.

Mike is a true wielder of the SharePoint blade.

Me, I feel like the tip of the sword, well maybe more than just the tip. My roll as a developer sees me churning out solutions that my line manager and myself come up with together that keep us moving towards our overall strategy. What I find frustrating, being the tip is I tend to spend all my time developing (I know, it is my job) but have little time to look at where the next blow will land. In short, when you're buried in code constantly, you don't get time to sit back and look at the bigger picture and say, "Look at this fantastic opportunity we have, what we're doing is great but we can do so much better". 

Let me describe my enthusiasm, how it works and where it fails.

I don't come from an educational background, my personal education was uneventful, and probably poor in general. I don't know much about pedagogy or learning. What I do know is how to create a solution to a problem, I can see where things could work better, and how to improve them. Although I am loath to quote Vanilla Ice, "You got a problem, yo I'll solve it". I feel it's what I'm good at, if it is true that everyone has a gift, god know I'd struggle to identify mine but I'd have to say it's solutioning software.

Bringing that into education, I see lots of things that can be improved in the online education and parental engagement process, and have a vivid picture of what I would consider a reasonable "End Game" for our portal solution. That vision enthuses and motivates me. When I'm enthused and motivated I code faster and better, however this tends to be where the story starts to turn sour.

Firstly, and I can't help but be open about this, it's the way I am, but the constant niggly changes that I'm asked to do destroy my soul outright. This, more than anything else, is why I can't see a future in this job. These are things that are agreed and agreed again and once completed changed to something that had been dismissed out of hand as bad ideas. I feel I have little to know integrity, professionally. As I write this part of me realises this isn't the place to vent, but I like to think I wear my heart on my sleeve (blog) after everything I've been through in life, but I really should create that feature where some posts are restricted to me.

Having integrity at work is important to me. I feel that if I maintain a high level of integrity, then people will respect me for it and develop a better idea of what I will produce. I also think it makes me a better developer. The problem is that I become so disillusioned and often dumbfounded by the often 360 degree changes, I loose all will to fight back, and often wonder if my attempt at integrity would be interpreted as an unwillingness to work. In fact, I think this weekend I'm going to go for a do or die letter to my managers.

As if that wasn't enough, productivity is further hampered by environment. Physically it's a horrible office to work in, so hot, no space, and no where you can collaborate and evolve ideas. Mentally its oppressive also, everyone, bar none, is in a support role, where as myself and my manager (who is really great by the way, and if I could go elsewhere I'd want him to come) are the only ones who perform a creative role. The resulting noise makes it hard to think as do the constant distractions, but everyone expects you to work like a support person, instantly handling issues that come in, they can't understand that I'm one person.

Okay lets try and recover this from rant into something constructive.

The final problem tends to be SharePoint itself. It's a great piece of software, hugely powerful and I would recommend it to anyone for intranet / extranet services. As a developer though, it can be so frustrating. My main issue is the time between hitting the f5 key to deploy your webpart, and the server coming back to life so you can see what your code is doing. I call this death time, because it kills my productivity. This is a 3-5 minute window and I try to stay focussed, but it's very hard. I tend to check The Times (quality journalism) or the Evening Post (something resembling journalism) or the Ammanford Guardian (best described as town gossip and a roundup of the weeks traffic offences). This can double death time, and hence the name. Luckily, SharePoint 2010 should make this a thing of the past, god let it be true.

So, that's my experience of being the sword tip, now I want to move more into being the wielder, but is that possible without becoming ineffective? I think it's possible, but until things change in work I don't think it'll happen. My manager and I have both said, we feel more motivated and excited by our jobs when we're not in work. I think that says it all.