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Mykhailo Toporkov 🇺🇦 -
mahdi -
Sukhpinder Singh -
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Top comments (61)
When a fellow dev asked for my help. In their eyes at least, I wasn't a newbie.
This! When people started asking my help.
Your brain goes in this mode: "are you serious? me? are you sure you're asking the right person?" :D
The answer is always: yes, you can do it, even if you're not an expert or you don't feel like you are
For me it’s the surprise when you feel like you know exactly how to help.
yeap, this is it...
When I successfully engineered an entire system. It took months but I went from being handed the concept, a single ticket with 10 bullet points. To designing and building a very complex system that integrated with multiple applications in our ecosystem. That gave me so much confidence.
When I started rebasing like it was no big deal
For me it was when I realized that learning new languages was easier than I thought it was.
Oh that's a good one! I need to invest more time in different languages. I agree that it is not intimidating anymore, it's just quicker to reach for what I know.
But hey timely topic for me because I just started playing with elixir.
I try to, once a year, take a language that seems interesting and run through the intro learning stages. Usually the tutorials on their website, or some other place. I don't have to learn everything, just enough to get me familiar with the syntax, setting up the environment, developing some small tool, and trying to understand how the language solves problems compared to other languages.
If I like it enough, I will consider using it, if not, I will take what I learned and see how to apply it in what I use day to day. That's how I learned and stuck with python. I learned Erlang a few years ago but didn't stick with it. My latest is playing with Go and Rust. But I am not sure yet. I love them, but I also love python.
I work at a fairly small company and at the beginning, it was just me and my boss. Looking up to him and having him as the only person around I could compare myself to, I felt like such a newbie for years.
Eventually, we started to hire more people and I was fortunate enough to mentor several of them. It's weird, but I think it was when I was able to answer most of their questions, most of the time, that I realized that maybe I weren’t such a newbie anymore.
... I still feel like one, though 🤷♂️
I think we all still feel like a newb. Even years in.
It's not just you 😁
And that's a good thing.
Feeling like a newbie can motivate you to keep learning🤓.
Exactly right! When you stop feeling overwhelmed with keeping up, then you should probably retire 🤣
I'm kinda in a similar situation right now. Small startup, just me and my boss as main developers with the occasional contractor. Been working for about a year and coding for about 2. Still feel extremely newbish.
You got any tips for being in this kind of situation? Particularly in regards to not having people to compare yourself to
Sure plenty of tips.
I think it's important to realize that you don't have to compare yourself to others to stop feeling like a newbie.
For me, what helped the most, was starting to build a sense of accomplishment.
I started to keep a journal of all the things I had done that made me proud. It could be little things, like helping a colleague or finally fixing an overwhelming bug I had struggled with. It could be bigger things like finishing a client project I had taken on or finally finishing that side project I had struggled to take time out of my schedule to do.
Writing it down was key to me. On days where I feel like I'm no good or that newbie sensation starts creeping up on me again, I look in my journal, and remind myself that I can do this — and so can you! 💪
That sounds like a good idea. I keep a general for general life stuff I enjoy, never thought of keeping one for dev accomplishments. Thanks for the tip!
When I decided "Wait, we don't need a library for this" and wrote vanilla JS code to solve a problem (date picker, pop-up menu, dropdowns) in a faster, more performant way for users.
I was genuinely happy when I realized I would not have been able to do that just several months prior.
At the beginning of my career I had pretty bad soft skills because I went from solo guy working alone to being a part of the team. I'm very fortunate I had very good people around me who guided me and helped me understand the importance of soft skills.
When I managed to understand the importance of sof skills and utilize them in my day-to-day work my career started rapidly changing and I never looked back.
What I wanted to say is that I realized I weren't a newbie anymore when I learned to utilise my soft skills.
I love this answer. :) Too many people dismiss "soft skills" (I wish there was a better name for them) as skills that are easy or innate. I've also had to put a lot of time and effort into building my soft skills. I wish more people understood their value, especially in the tech industry.
When I started asking the question "why" instead of "how" and "what"?
In shorter terms, making decisions that benefit the product holistically. And always never losing the bigger picture.
The first time a senior dev looked at my PR and approved it without corrections or comments, mentioning later on about the nice quality of the solution. Paired along with that, once I stoped asking others what to do next and started to delegate the next TODOs to myself.
Maybe it was when I encountered a segmentation fault in some complicated C++ code, and for the first time, I wasn't afraid, confused, baffled, or dreading it, but rather excited. I had it fixed within minutes. I don't remember the circumstances, just the thought "Wow, I'm actually good at this."
This - thanks for the trigger Jason :) In my case it was while debugging a hardware driver for an ISA bus card, that I suddenly realised I was enjoying it, although the swearing has never stopped..!
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