Developer Diaries: Week 4 - The exploding brain

#testing #devjournal #javascript #react

What a week! Let's dive right in.

Imposter Syndrome

Let's start off with the worst part of this week. I was getting a little discouraged because I had a PR that it just seemed no matter what I did on it, it wasn't good enough. And I 💯% know it's because I have a team that wants to push me and help me be the best version I can be, but man sometimes it's just a little deflating when you can't get something quite right.

It had over 74 comments on it and 9 commits before it was finally ready to go. And with each commit, I'd be like, okay this is perfect now, right? And it wasn't. 😭 I was like "Do I even know what I'm doing? Should I be here if I can't write code well yet?"

But honestly, when I look at where it started vs where it ended, I could tell it was totally worth it, and I learned a lot along the way. Everyone was very patient with me and there was zero shaming for my lack of knowledge or anything like that - it was definitely a "let's do this better together" type of thing, and I was extremely grateful for it in the end, but in the process, I felt a little deflated at having to keep on trying and not getting it quite perfect.

I actually found Reddit to be a nice space to vent for a bit and got a ton of encouragement on this post. So if you're having down days, that's totally normal. There's no such thing as perfect code, and more feedback is totally normal and helps you grow. Reach out to your folks and #TrustTheProcess.

Learning How To Test with Jest

Part of my Really Long PR (as it will henceforth be named) involved a request for setting up test. This is great, but I had never set up a test before, and it proved to be a little challenging - not just for me, but also another senior dev who was helping me! I was honestly a little encouraged that it wasn't a cut and dry, super simple thing for him either, but together we were able to figure it out, and I actually started added tests to my other PR that I had out, as well!

So I'm going to try to start incorporating more of that to practice. I found Google a little frustrating here, because I'd be like "how do i x with Jest and Enzyme" and i saw all sorts of answers, and honestly, a lot of them didn't work at all. It was super strange. But with some patience and tweaking I was able to get it.

Standup Improvements

We currently do standups on M/W/F, but we're contemplating moving those 15 minute meetings to T/TR, and on the other days do an "asynchronous" standup. To do that, we are evaluating if we want to just create a Slackbot reminder message in our channel, or if we want to involve a more formal Standup Bot tool, like Geekbot.

I got to check into the standup bot tools, and I think Geekbot is actually pretty cool. Sends users a DM with questions, and then compiles those answers in a standup report in the channel. I had some fun while I was testing it out.