UPDATE: Fixed formatting. Thanks, Brock!

Two developers recently joined our team. Johnny has worked with Drupal before, and needs a little help getting used to Drupal 6 and Views 2. Elena is an IT architect who is new to both IBM and Drupal. She needs a lot more help getting started, because she doesn’t know what things are called yet and she isn’t yet accustomed to the Drupal way of doing things. For my part, I work on Workflow, node access, and other requirements that require deep Drupal hacking.

I’m learning to check on Elena more frequently and to help her break down tasks. Otherwise, she might get lost or stuck, because she might not yet know where things are or whether she’s getting closer to an answer. I’ve made good progress on the things we’ve planned for this iteration, and I can invest the time into helping our new team members be more productive and learn more effectively.

Both Elena and Johnny have set up their debuggers in Eclipse, so they don’t have to figure out the right places to insert var_dumps. Instead, they can trace through the relevant pieces of code, learning more about the structures and the flow of Drupal websites along the way.

Although I occasionally struggle to explain things I take for granted, I enjoy helping someone who’s new to an area. It helps me remember the things people need to learn. For example, Elena’s work on surveys requires her to learn about nodes, getting values from the $_REQUEST, loading nodes, working with CCK, altering forms, adding new form fields using the Form API, and using Drupal functions for links and text. We broke down the task into the following steps:

1. Create a CCK node type.
2. Use hook_form_alter to add some text to the form.
3. Load a node and fill the information in the form.
4. Get the extra node ID from the URL.
5. Adapt form_alter for the case where you’re editing the node.

We’ve managed our planning well, so I don’t feel overcommitted or stretched with the additional mentoring I’ve taken on. The time is an investment that will pay off both in the short-term as well as the long-term. If I can slow down and write more, then the investment can benefit to other people too.

I like this. It’s certainly much better than leaving developers to flounder and work things out on their own, and I learn a lot in the process of helping. Maybe that will be one of my specialties: projects where other people are learning a lot on the fly.

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