It's 2 A.M. now, and between the sound of my mechanical keyboard and some random music from my 'chil music' spotify's
playlist, I'm inspired to tell you a story.
It is about some guy (me), who occasionnaly started a career in I.T. so by accident as the reason of why I do It. I am a brazilian guy, who was born into a small city, that still thinks that the I.T. path is just for the too much intelligent people (they still call us Nerds, with a pretty strange intonation, and all possible misconception). But please stay, I'll ellaborate it better, take your time, sit and listen.
I didn't started like many people out there, by curiosity or dedication. I was just an ordinary addicted PC gamer, that
by his godmother's death missed the day for enrolling in another totally different course, about a career that is pretty common in my city. These ones that people usually do when are teenagers, becaming adults that really don't know what they want for their lives. And fortunately, not that sad as it sounds, I did the best choice for my life.
Years after, I learned PHP in a local company, that develops websites, mostly for companies around my city and the surroundings. My mentor, a really pacient 25 years old guy, not much of a teacher, but a good hearted person, tried his best to show me how to code near the way he did. All procedural codes, full of mistakes and poor perfomance dirty codes, that showed me what 'real life' development was like. Fast, sloppy but everyone trying to help each other do in time what was demanded by our crazy commercial departament in this company. Thanks to them, I learned a lot about deadlines. Please, stay with me, we're almost there.
Now, I work at the local town hall, developing an infinite variety of modules for our Intranet System, that we developed here, using our CodeIgniter base (ordinary LAMP development), that gathers all of our employees to access many features and functions automatizing much of their work. They feel very grateful every time we release a new module, our team was complimented a lot of times, and in one occasion, they tried to 'give' our work to another city, what pissed us off a lot. But the point is, after all these compliments, people saying we are really good for them, I don't feel that way. I feel like all I did have a lot of flaws and in need of serious improvements. But the REAL point is, I don't know How to do IT. I really don't know and feel how I can learn more.
So I found this community, full of people commited to help each other, shared their ideas, like now I was reading this text of this guy explaining how to handle our responsability that is to be a Dev, and learn some steps to improve. I really think thats the way. But I have a favour to ask to you guys.
Could you please help me improve? Near my city, we don't have this much of good institutions that teaches a lot about development with good quality. Searching in the internet, I really find a lot of good stuff. But I really don't know where to start. My goals are always to improve, after all. I really want to be a reference as a developer and a better team leader, cause I love to teach and spread the word.
To summarize, what I really need, are topics to study about Leadearship, how to improve my dev skills in PHP, and how to really use it as the way it should be. I don't know how to draw a timeline, for what to study first, then what topics go after I've learned this or that. Believe me, I'm really not that lazy to only ask for things, and not really doing anything about it. Right now I'm trying to understand better about Laravel, and if I can change to this envirorment in my work. I'm really trying my best, but I think I'm stagnated. An example: I think I've missed a lot about how JavaScript has evolved, and how little I Know. For me, Jquery was the s*** for many years, and I mean it. Even Node.JS, I didn't knew about what It really was, and the many new ways of developing right now.
If one of your kind souls out there could help me out in my inner developer quest, please, reccommend me some paths to follow, like one order of books or courses, or what technologies I should learn to improve the standards and quality of my projects, and to teach the right way to be a dev. And really become one, because today, I feel just like the way I did when I started, nine or ten years ago. Thank you so much for your time.
Top comments (2)
That's some real talk, thank you for being so open and sharing this story!
Don't be too hard on yourself though, you're already creating things in a professional setting, putting them out there and having them used by people who are happy to use them. That's quite the achievement.
I think I understand it though; you want to grow, be better at what you do and truly understand the tools you're working with and know that you're using them in the best way. There's plenty information on the internet but it's so hard to find a good learning path and know where to start.
What I've learned over the years is that there are plenty of people who are willing to help out with that! I don't know if you're on Twitter, but Stephanie Hurlburt has this tweet asking for people to reply if they're open to help / mentor. The tweet has hundreds of replies with brilliant people and shockingly just a few get taken up on their offer. If you're looking for someone to guide you a bit, that might be a good start!
This is why we write this kind of posts, to hear this type of feedback. It can really help you evolve, in any matter!
I'm kinda new to Twitter, just because I didn't really understand how to use it to improve as a developer, and only Facebook, because of friends and the 'fun' (not so much, so I'm diminishing the use every day).
Thank you so much for the recommendations and for reading and understanding it! I'll do my best to improve and hopefully share this journey, about how I can Improve myself and the world (maybe, I hope), with you guys!
And I recommend this post to start this journey - What a Developer Should Really Catch