We’re tinkerers, and we believe that’s what makes us good at our jobs. For example, Frederik’s house runs on a Raspberry Pi in the basement. Everything, from the front door to the patio lights, is connected to that little machine. These days, that’s not really that impressive, but most of the hardware components predate Alexa and Google integration, so he had to build these automations and integrations the hard way.
He’d like to tell you that his Pi orchestrates the events in his house with the grace of a conductor in a symphonic orchestra, but the truth is that it’s cobbled together and in a perpetual state of almost failing. Chris, on the other hand, has created several trading robots that follow the exchange rates and make small trades based on market signals. He’d like to tell you that they give Buffet a run for his money, but they have a tendency to go on weird sprees after a while. Both Chris’ robots and Frederik’s home automation are flawed, but they love them for the same reason: there’s always something they can try to optimize, and there’s always something they can break by doing so.
Tinkering goes hand in hand with two concepts we believe are extremely valuable as a Salesforce consultant: curiosity and a love for building. Curiosity is why we spend so much time trying to understand our customers and what they do. It’s why we love designing cutting edge solutions that are innovative and creative, and why we are constantly learning new technologies. Our love for building is why we put so much effort in what we create and craft. The combination of these two concepts is also one of the reasons why we like engaging so much with our customers, even after our projects. In a way, we’re just curious to see how the thing we built for you ends up being used.
Tinkering also taught us something else, and that is an appreciation for breaking things. We are deeply convinced that you don’t truly know how something works unless you’ve broken it and tried to fix it. There’s really no better or faster way of becoming an expert on something than by breaking it. The immediate fear of breaking it is an excellent motivator, and by troubleshooting it you will learn that what you thought you knew before was just scratching the surface of it. Secondly, and this is closely related to our curiosity, if you’re afraid of breaking something that already works, you’ll never find better ways of making it work.
Because tinkering is almost synonymous to breaking things, it’s always a bit of a gamble. In the ideal scenario, you took something apart and replaced it with something better and new. Worst case, you end up with something broken, but at least you’ll know exactly why it’s broken.
There’s one last thing that every tinkerer becomes aware of at one point or another, and that is that there always comes a time when you find yourself spending more and more time, in order to realize smaller and smaller improvements. In a way, you risk becoming the hostage of the assumptions and the tools you had at the beginning of your project. Perhaps the technology you’re using has become outdated, or maybe the problem you were trying to solve initially changed completely. When that time comes you can either give up, or you can pivot, adapt and start again to try and build something new that is 10x better, rather than trying to make your old project 10% better. A tinkerer embraces change, it’s part of the fun, even when that change means starting anew.
Of course, these types of chances are not chances we take on your time, nor do we actively seek out to break the things that are working for you. We’re also not going to come in and throw your existing tools or solutions out the window. What you can be sure of, however, is that when you invite us to the table to look at a problem for you, we probably already broke it ourselves at one point. And that when we see a way of enabling you to do something 10X better, rather than 10% better, we’ll tell you.