Remember to Ask for Help

Yesterday I worked on building the new Praxis website for 12 hours straight, from 12-12, after spending the morning on coaching calls with Praxis participants. I was getting a lot of good work done, then I hit a wall with coding out this timeline:

I tried a bunch of different solutions for about three hours. Nothing worked. I got frustrated and almost convinced myself that this just couldn’t be done. It was about midnight at this point. I knew how to make the month boxes offset from each other on the left and right and make the whole thing responsive OR make the month boxes overlapping like this and the whole thing static/non-responsive. But not both.

Then, thankfully, I took a step back for a brief moment. The designer we contracted to design this is well-known and a great web developer in his own right. I was pretty sure that he wouldn’t design something that he couldn’t actually build himself. So I emailed him and asked for guidance.

Within a few hours he got back to me with a rough solution. He immediately pointed out two things that alluded me:

Making 3 discrete sizes makes much more sense than making everything completely fluid

The floats work well with content in them, but are completely broken without content in them. I tried to mock this up with very little content in it, which produced strange results. With content in place it functions as expected.

With an hour and a half, I took the rough solution he outlined and turned it into a fully functioning polished version of the design.

This was a great reminder for me:

I don’t know all the answers, even if I think I do.

When I start to get frustrated, I need to take a step back.

Sometimes I need to ask for help.