Alright, let me tell you about working on something with Jake San Miguel recently. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, just a real practical thing we had to sort out.
We had this annoying issue with how some reports were being generated. Stuff was slow, sometimes inaccurate. Everyone knew it was a pain, but nobody had really dug into it properly. My boss tapped me to take a look, see if I could smooth it out. First thing I did was track down Jake. He’s been around a while, knows where the bodies are buried, you know?
So, I found Jake, grabbed him for a coffee, and laid out the problem. He listened patiently, didn’t interrupt much. Just sort of absorbed it all. Then he said, “Okay, let’s start at the beginning. Show me exactly what you’re doing now.”
We went back to my desk. I walked him through the steps I took, the tools I used, how the data was pulled. He watched, asked a few questions here and there. Simple stuff, like “Why this step?” or “Where does that number come from?”. It felt a bit like going back to basics, but honestly, it helped me see it fresh too.
Then we spent maybe half a day just pulling apart the existing process. Not literally, but on paper. We mapped out the flow. Jake was good at this, sketching it out, finding the messy spots. We identified a couple of areas that looked really inefficient. One part was pulling way more data than needed, another part involved some weird manual copy-pasting that was just asking for trouble.
Getting Hands Dirty
The next step was trying to fix it. Jake wasn’t about massive overhauls. He preferred small changes, testing as we went. First, we tackled the data pulling part. We tweaked the query, made it much more specific. Ran it. Boom, much faster already. That felt good.
Then we looked at the manual step. Jake suggested a simple script. Nothing fancy, just something to automate that specific bit of copying and pasting. I’m not a super coder, but Jake talked me through it. We built it together, tested it on some dummy data first. It worked okay.
- We started by outlining the current messy process.
- Jake helped pinpoint the weak spots.
- We adjusted the data query for efficiency.
- We wrote a small script to automate a manual task.
- Tested each change carefully before moving on.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing. The script had a few hiccups initially. Wrong formats, things like that. We spent a bit of time debugging, tweaking it until it ran reliably. Jake was really calm through it all, which helped. No panic, just “Okay, what did it do? Let’s check the log.”
The Result
By the end of it, maybe took us a couple of days all told, the reporting process was way better. Faster, definitely. And because we removed the manual step, it was more reliable too. No more weird copy-paste errors.
Working with Jake San Miguel was good. Learned a fair bit just watching him work. He’s methodical, practical. Doesn’t overcomplicate things. Just looks at the problem, breaks it down, and starts fixing the obvious bits first. It’s a solid way to work, really. Made me realize you don’t always need some grand new system, sometimes just cleaning up the current mess makes a world of difference.
