Talk 3 of The Tech Academy’s series, and the one where the subject is not a tool but a habit: what you actually do in the moment you are stuck.
Most advice about getting unstuck is about looking harder. Last time we went deep on the browser DevTools, which answers where to look. This one is about what to do when looking has not worked, and the reason you are stuck is that you are waiting on something. Usually a person.
The workshop runs on a small, deliberately unfinished app: a community lost-pet registry called Homeward. It is messier than it looks. The page loads, the records are all there, but six of the seven have no photo. One thing is broken in a way that says nothing at all. And one thing cannot be fixed, because the app is missing a credential that only I have. That last part is the point.
The two moves we practice:
- Ask what you can do right now. Not “how do I solve this,” which is a wall, but “what is available to me in the next ten minutes,” which is a menu.
- Build around the gap and shrink the ask. When what is missing belongs to someone else, stub out the hole, keep building the parts that do not need it, and turn “can you help me” into one precise question that is easy to answer.
We start with the ask, not with the bugs. The delegation request goes out in the first few minutes, and while it sits in someone else’s inbox we work on everything else. The wait is not dead air. It is the assignment.
Try it
Open the app in a new tab. It loads in the state students see: working, but not finished.
Open the slides if you want the framing: who I am, why this topic, and how the session runs. Arrow keys or the buttons move between slides.
The access request
Click “Show on map” on any animal. A modal will open asking you to request access.
- Enter any email and click “Request access.” (Your email is not saved or sent.)
- A timer will start. The ops team takes about six minutes to reply.
- While you wait, go fix the three bugs in the app.
- When the timer expires, an access code appears. Show it to Mindi to get the real map key.
If you want to fix it yourself
The hosted page is for looking. To change the code you need the files on your machine, because the loop is edit the file, save, refresh the browser.
- Download the app (one zip, six files).
- Unzip it.
- Open
index.htmlin your browser. - Edit
script.jsin any text editor, save, refresh.
The Sources tab in DevTools is for looking, not editing. Set breakpoints, inspect values, read the code as the browser sees it. Edits typed directly into Sources vanish the moment you reload.