I can open a beer with anything

When I was about 18, I was working with a guy named Darryl. We both worked for my cousin, he was the mechanic and foreman, I was just a helping hand. We were working after hours in the shop on our own vehicles, he on his motorbike that he was rebuilding (an old Honda, if I remember correctly), and I was working on my pride and joy. My 1981 Volvo.

It wasn’t just any Volvo - it was a cream coloured, two door coupe, about 90 horsepower, and I knew just how to press that awkward shifter with my palm and move it into low so I could hopefully chirp the tires as I sped off in my teenaged freedom.

My grandmother essentially willed the car to me - I remember clearly her asking my dad for a dollar, and not telling us why. She was in the hospital and it was pretty clear she was going to stay. She focused on the dollar closely, asking my dad for one several times until he finally relented. As he passed the dollar she slipped the pink slip into his hands. I didn’t know my grandmother that well unfortunately, but that was her style from my perspective. A deal needed to be struck, and so she made it happen.

Anyways, back to working on the vehicle with Darryl - we were having beers while working on our cars, he was big into Dos Equis at the time, and it comes in a green bottle. I tell you this because it was an import, and the cap had to be popped off. One of Darryl’s trademark moves was to open the beer with something improvisational. This was always good for a laugh from me as we were working in a shop with infinite tools, but there was always an opportunity to get creative with this little act.

The outcome that we were looking for is obvious, an opened beer. The tools we had around us were hammers, wrenches, air equipment, welding equipment, you name it. Darryl opened my car door, and discovered gleefully that the latch, that metal loop that my car door grabbed onto when it closed, fit the lid of his beer bottle perfectly. Of all the tools around us, Darryl opened his beer with my car.

I learned something from that surprising act that I carry with me to this day, and it’s served me well so far. That improvisational approach to problem solving has done me well over the years. I rarely sit at a job and think - “I’m not trained for this”, I am more inclined to think “what do I have access to that can help me do this job?” It’s not some skill that I am trying to lord over others, but I think it’s just a useful perspective to have sometimes when you’re stumped, or when you’re looking at software and thinking about the job that you have to do.

I recently showed a prototype that I’d made to some potential clients that took a bit of a leap from their original description of the solution to their problem. They wanted a really wide table (~30 columns), and I showed them a 4 column table with the last column having room for their 26 statuses that could be described by a simple tagging system, plus with plenty of entropy for them to have more!

They looked at my solution and couldn’t quite see their problem being solved, when they saw my proposal. “If only they’d seen Darryl open that beer!” I thought to myself, then they’d understand that they could find the outcomes they’re looking for (informed staff) in my solution (a sweet tagging system) just like Darryl saw the opened beer in my car door latch.

But I suppose not everyone thinks like that, and that’s part of my job - I need to bring these two worlds just close enough together until that picture snaps into place in both our minds. After all - a key value pair doesn’t really need to look like a tag, does it? And we have their complete set of keys and values that they need to display in this table, don’t we?

So now the challenge is to strike that balance, find the perfect solution that solves the customers’ problem, other customers love, sells the next ten customers, makes the designers and developers gleeful with it’s simplicity and lack of tech debt.

I need to find my latch for the car door of my ‘81 Volvo and open a beer.