During the time of your career, you will be learning new things. What about my breakfast? The toast had some gouda cheese, blue cheese, eggs, scallions, and smoked pepper. My toast and your career is a sum of ingredients and the way we prepare it.
The importance of good ingredients
We may agree that cheese for a toast is like a code for a developer.
I was once served a toast consisting only of bread and cheese. It did the job of filling my hunger meter, but the taste was not great. That's why I decided today to add some smoked pepper to my morning toast.
I wanted something extraordinary.
When we start our development career, we start with the basics. Bread and cheese. A programming language and ability to make something out of it. To get to the next level, we have to add something to our skills. What should it be?
Is it blue cheese? Is it writing a maintainable code? You can experiment on your own or find one of the thousands of recipes online. Thankfully, both for development career and breakfast.
To get a feeling of what extraordinary means, you may need to look around. One time I went to a restaurant and paid quite a price for a toast. With the first bite, I knew I was dealing with something special. How?
It's important to try different things. The same applies to codebases, frameworks, and problem solutions. Working only within one project makes it hard to get new perspectives. I had been lucky to visit enough places to know that the price I paid for my toast was justifiable.
Workshops, projects, meetups, conferences, videos, tweets, articles.
With time you will learn what extraordinary means for you.
You already know how my finished toast looked like from the outside. What about the taste? It was good but not balanced.
When I bite the edge of my toast, I could feel only gouda and bread, maybe a little bit of egg. The same may happen when people interact with you. Your coding skills might be top-notch, but you cannot express your ideas well. As a result, it sounds uninteresting, bland. Like the edge of my toast.
Our work as developers consists of many activities. One way to perform well is to invest time and acquire basic knowledge in all areas. Communication, working as a team, explaining tough concepts. If you struggle with some of those, you may end with mixed results. We may aim to be the best engineer, but our software architecture skills won't get us far if people don't enjoy working with you.
It's great to add some 12-month ripened goat cheese to your toast.
I only want you to remember to spread butter all over your toast as well.
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