The importance of admiring in tech

This is a strange title, right? 🤔. What does "Admiration" have to do with databases, complex algorithms, and frameworks? True, it actually doesn't have any relation with them, but with the people that actually develop those, yes, admiration is a widespread human emotion.

In this article, I will explain why is so important in the Tech Community.

What is admiration anyway?

Admiration is a social emotion felt by observing people of competence, talent, or skill exceeding standards.

Source: Wikipedia

Against cultural misconception, we, developers 👩🏽‍💻🧑🏼‍💻👩🏻‍💻👨🏿‍💻, are actually very social human beings who share several things in common, a love for technology and what it can offer, the joy of sharing knowledge with others, participate in exciting projects, and build really cool stuff while having fun.

In the road of your life/career, you will cross with several amounts of developers, co-workers, superiors, employees, providers, teachers, people with who you share the stage in conferences and it's inevitable to feel admiration for most of them.

Yes, because there are amazing people out there, a lot, maybe you admire someone for her/his capacity for innovation, maybe you admire your tech lead because is able to solve issues and stay calm intense situation, maybe you admire a group of developers because they build technologies that you enjoy (Yes Vue.js and Nuxtjs team, I'm talking about you 😉).

At a certain point, admiring people motivates self-improvement.

Real-life case

When I was a junior developer, I had the unrealistic idea that I was the best at what I was doing, until reality hit hard to my ego badly and I started to meet people that were way better than myself in every aspect, from coding knowledge to soft skills. I was perplexed but at the same time my motivation rocket up 🚀 real fast. I want to be as awesome as they're.

Since we're kids, we learn by watching and copying/imitating behaviors, even if we do it irrationally at first, and with time it converts to knowledge, to self-improvement

Another real anecdote, when I started at my current job, we're designated to PSL (I think is People Success Leader) under our pathway that serves as a mentor and advocate. My mentor is just like Obi-wan Kenobi, freaking awesome, from coding skills to his capacity of speaking and be loved and respected by everyone that interacts with him. I admire him (still do) and I wanted to become a developer like him.

So I started to imitate all the behaviors and practices that I admired, which helped me improve a lot as a developer and as a person along with continuous feedback and a bunch of pair programming sessions until I fell into the error of trying to be "the new 2.0". Big NO, as much as you admire somebody, every person is different, a whole new world, every person has a tendency for certain things, more or fewer capabilities in different areas.

Admiration for others must drive you to be a better version of yourself, yeah, I know, it sounds like a cheesy cliché but it's the big fat truth. In the process of self-improvement, admiration helps you detect the areas you are better on, the areas that need more work, and the areas that you are willing to improve about yourself.

Should they know?

Yes, why not? It's very positive to let the people you admire them, interact on social media like Twitter, always in a respectful way of course (avoid creepy/flirty messages). You might even end up working together with them and they could also admire you. 😉

Admiring other people and letting them know is also a way of feedback to re-ensure their motivation and willingness to keep sharing knowledge around the community and doing cool stuff that helps others to improve, and who knows, more sooner than later you also become that role-model for someone else. 🤩

People that I admire the most inside the tech industry:

• Evan Payne - My mentor I was referring to before.
• Natalia Venditto - Solution Architect at my company, she is a GoogleDevExpert and a reference on Angular all over the globe. She is a total Frontend Rockstar (literally she also sings awesome!).
• Debbie O'Brien - I met her in a Vue tech talk in Holaluz and contribute with her on Nuxt documentation in Spanish. She is awesome at speaking, a contagious cheerful spirit creates tons of valuable content, and probably one funniest devs around (You must see her taekwondo references on her slides 😂).
• Marc Backes - I started to admire him after seeing his live code session on Vuejs Global event when talking about Reactivity. Was amazed by how calm he was and the quality of the presentation. He changed my perception of how I want to structure my own presentations and content. He is also a really easy going person to interact on Twitter.
• Guillaume Chau - he is probably one of the humblest, kind devs around, part of the Vue.js core team and responsible for the vue-devtools repo we all couldn't live without it.
• Posva - Eduardo is one of the core members of vue.js, I admire him for his contribution to opensource in such projects like vue-router which help me understand the migration to Vue3 and doing my own vue library. His presentations at several conferences I assisted gave me the motivation to grow as a speaker. It was nice that I actually received feedback from him.
• Sébastien Chopin and Alexandre Chopin - Creators of Nuxt.js, I admire that they build such an amazing framework and community around it and the interactions we have when doing small contribution to a Nuxt related module source code.
• Pooya Parsa - I haven't interact with him directly but learned a lot from his contributions to open source. Just brilliant!
• Alba Silvente - We contribute together to the translation of Nuxt docs to Spanish, since there I admire her cheerful spirit and content, especially related to how to be an ambassador and code tutorials.

And you, who do you admire? 🤩. Tag them in this post to let them know how much you admire them.