Table of Contents
Knock, Knock: The First Domino
The Numbers and a Plot Twist
How Did I End Up Here?
Door #1: Let Go for Being Too Good...
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Hey Giorgi! Glad you can start kicking this off till the countdown!
On your article, I am glad you are here on DEV and the journey it took you! Hopefully they will eventually find the easter egg later on (but it's too early to tell. You have to wait later on haha).
Otherwise, looking forward to next year as Giorgi will return...
It's an honor to kick this off! :hattip:
Let's see if anyone finds the easter egg.😏
Thanks. Now im curious. 🤔🤷♀️
Spoiler alert: it's a good one.
considering the possible interpretations of easter egg, I think the readers should at least be given scope. 😂
I think I found it.
The part about not feeling worthy enough to even register really stood out to me.
It's easy to assume you need to be an expert before you start sharing what you know, but sometimes you grow into the person you wanted to be simply by showing up consistently.
The fact that you went from being afraid to comment to building such a strong presence on DEV is a powerful reminder of that.
Thanks a lot! I hope newcomers today will learn things from me not to make the same mistake and start creating their content now.
"I didn't feel worthy of registering, let alone writing a comment" is something way more people feel than will ever say out loud. Your brain had all these rules about who gets to speak here, and none of them were real. Each door you walked through showed it that the thing it was scared of wasn't actually dangerous. Getting let go for being overqualified and still walking into that interview nervous is a good reminder too. The nerves didn't mean you weren't ready. They were just your alarm going off before you acted. Writing this for your younger anxious self is going to land for a lot of people sitting where you were.
Definitely. If only I had half the mindset I have now... but sometimes it's not possible, cause it takes time, experience, failures, and so many other things that just come with showing up every single day and trying your best.
100%. You can't skip that part. The mindset you have now didn't come from someone handing it to you, it came from showing up and seeing over and over that the stuff you were scared of didn't wreck you. Every one of those days took a little more of the fear off. Honestly that's the best thing about the post, it shows the process instead of just the result.
The call to your mom was my favourite part. After reading about you waiting in that cold university building, that moment felt earned. Glad you kept those details in—they tell us much more than the follower count.
Yeah, she's been my biggest supporter all along, so it only made sense that she'd be the first to know.
And yes, that day was freezing cold. There's so much more to the story, but I wanted to keep it short.
The moment you asked to use C++ is the part I'd put in front of a nervous junior. You changed an assumption instead of spending the whole session struggling with unfamiliar syntax. I'd love a follow-up on what you clarify early now: language, time limit, expected completeness, or something else? That seems like a useful skill to practise alongside the coding.
It's been a long time since my last job interview as a candidate, and the experience and skills I have now aren't even in the same galaxy as what I had back then. These days I'm way more methodical and the questions are infinitely more complex.
I've interviewed dozens of software engineers, and during the system design round I deliberately keep my instructions vague. I want to see whether candidates know how to ask the right questions and clarify the requirements before they even start thinking about a solution. That's an absolutely critical skill.
Great article again @georgekobaidze! I always feel motivated when I read topics like this. Makes me feel like I'm not alone (even though I am haha). Thank you for this, I'm gonna keep grinding until I get to a door of my own.
Thank you! Sometimes you go through hundreds of doors before you reach the right room. This brief story barely scratches the surface of how many doors I had to go through. The key is resilience, stubbornness, and outworking everyone else around.
A story full of struggle! :D
This barely scratches the surface, barely.
Truly great people are genuinely great.🙌🏻
Hi Giorgi! I'm glad I came across your article. It is so nice and interesting with a slight taste of nostalgia. Everyone was once a student who didn’t know whether they would succeed in the end. I think many people still feel this way.
But there's more ahead. Keep it up!
Thanks, yeah when things play out well, all the past struggles leave kind of a nostalgic feeling.
The line that hit me: "Truth be told, I'm doing all this for that young fella who was almost too anxious to ask if he could solve the problems in C++ instead of C#, and too broke to sit in a McDonald's to warm up on a freezing winter day."
I'm 42 days into my own journey of learning Python and trying to break into technical writing. I've published 35+ articles, cold-pitched founders, and even had an editor at freeCodeCamp tell me my first draft read too much like AI and needed to be completely rewritten. I've had my fair share of rejections.
But your story about the C++ interview is the one that sticks with me. It takes a lot of courage to sit in a room, realize you don't know the exact syntax, and raise your hand to say, "I don't know this, but I can solve it my way." That is exactly the mindset you need to survive in this industry.
I'm glad you found DEV, and I'm glad you're writing. This post is exactly what a junior dev needs to read when they feel like they don't belong yet.
Proud of you, man. Keep writing.
This is awesome! Thank you so much! Even if this helps one junior developer, I can consider my job done!🙌
What a journey! ❤️ Sometimes the setbacks we face become the very things that push us toward better opportunities. I love how you turned your struggles into growth and kept moving forward. A great reminder that you don’t have to be an expert to start; you just have to be willing to learn and take that first step. 🚀
Thank you! You’re on point! That’s the reason I just keep moving no matter the circumstances.
Your story is like a movie—so much fun to read! 😄 You managed to solve the C++ questions but not the C# ones. The only difference is the language, and you already knew the answers to the questions. I’m still a beginner, so there are many things I don’t understand yet. I couldn’t understand much of your GitHub post either because I don’t know how to use GitHub. But your motivational post is really good, and I could understand it. I read different kinds of content on DEV.to, and most of it is beginner-friendly. That’s why I like DEV.to so much. ❤️
You could literally create a whole 9 season TV show based on my experiences if you dive deep into details😄
It’s OK that you don’t understand many things. Take your time, you don’t need to rush and try to learn everything at once, that’s what I wasn’t able to take into consideration and it burned me out like crazy. Don’t let that happen to you.
Thanks bro!😊🗽🙇🏻♀️✨💥🥰🦚😃