No one knows all the things

Ximena — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I was going through my drafts and found this old one that I wanted to write about after a conversation in my favorite corner of the internet. (That's Cassidoo's private Discord server by the way and if you are not there you really should be. It's a great developer and other cool people community. Join us by supporting her on Patreon). Anyway, someone there shared this tweet by Emma Bostian:

Did you know you can use aliases to turn multiple, long terminal commands into one short command?

I didn't and IT IS LIFE CHANGING.

Instead of having to cd\ into nested folders and run a long command, I can type ONE COMMAND. pic.twitter.com/BG5CpuSMPL

— Emma Bostian 🐞 (@emmabostian) May 10, 2021

This is the conversation that followed:

so that's an interesting thing. Emma's been doing amazing things, and her only discovering this bit about the command line is weird, because it's something I imagine most people doing amazing things already know

To which someone else replied,

I don't think it's weird. Everyone has gaps in their knowledge

and then,

it's not weird that she didn't know. It's weird that I assumed she did

That last line, "It's weird that I assumed she did." It's true we look at other people and make assumptions based on what we see, on what they share. However, that is not enough to know their whole story, everyone has different experiences and you cannot compare them equally. Just because someone knows this one little thing it does not mean they are better than you, or the other way around. My reply was something along these lines:

I love seeing when people we assume must surely know all the things, actually don't and maybe we know a tiny little thing and they didn't. It's humbling and reminds us that we are all humans in our own paths.

It is a great reminder that no one knows all the things as smart or experienced as they are. We all have different experiences and we can learn from others but also teach others. It's common to think that as someone early in their career that all we can do is learn from others that have been around longer and that we can't teach them anything. The reality is a different one however, we each learn our own way, on our own path at different times. We should also be open to hear from people who we may think are "less experienced" because they probably know something you don't or have a better way of explaining a concept that is hard for you or you thought you knew.

Just yesterday I was talking to my uncle, who used to be a CS professor, about being a teacher. What makes a "good" or a "bad" teacher? In our opinion, a better teacher is one that does not pretend to know all the things and cannot or will not listen to their students but one that can admit they don't know everything and is willing to learn from them as well. It goes both ways. Students learn from a teacher, whether it's at school or as junior from a senior position at a job, but the one teaching can also learn a lot from their students.

Someone else also linked to this article by Dan Abramov, Things I Don’t Know as of 2018 and there are a few quotes there that I really liked.

People often assume that I know far more than I actually do. That’s not a bad problem to have and I’m not complaining. (Folks from minority groups often suffer the opposite bias despite their hard-earned credentials, and that sucks.)

– Dan Abramov

This happens a lot when you keep up with others in your industry or interests. For example I follow many developers and designers on social and we see all these people creating and sharing amazing things and we strive to do similar. What we don't often see is how long it took them to get there or how many times they failed. So, we assume they are these super humans that we want to be like but then, well, it's unrealistic so we may burnout trying to be that. All of these people have put in the work and I can assure also suffer from "impostor syndrome" just like you do. It's only natural to compare ourselves to people we admire but we can't forget we are all still… human. Don't stress. This is why I love seeing more and more people now who share their work and learning process, their failures, their insecurities, but also their wins, and their knowledge.

We can admit our knowledge gaps, may or may not feel like impostors, and still have deeply valuable expertise that takes years of hard work to develop.

– Dan Abramov

I’m aware of my knowledge gaps (at least, some of them). I can fill them in later if I become curious or if I need them for a project. This doesn’t devalue my knowledge and experience. There’s plenty of things that I can do well.

– Dan Abramov

Now, those knowledge gaps do not devalue what we already know, what we've messed up, what we've fixed, and all that we've learned. Those experiences are extremely valuable to us and to others. They make it easier to keep moving forward and get up faster or help others get up and keep going.

Like always, I ramble so I shall stop here with this reminder on the first day of the year as I resume my learning journey and prepare to somehow share it with whoever may find it helpful.

¡Hola Mundo!

Ximena — Fri, 31 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

¡Hola hola! Welcome to my little corner of the internet. This will be my digital space where I write about all things web, design, code, sketchnotes, work, life, games, food, books, and more. It's been a while since I have written anything, let alone share it. Bear with me here, the first many posts won't be great but that's the only way to get better, I suppose.

Now, I ramble…

How did I get here?

I have wanted to design and build my own website for years. Since I graduated college, maybe even before that but to be fair MySpace was enough at the time. In college I started with a Behance portfolio with my student work in hopes of getting that first job, which I did. Then I had a splash page for forever that turned into pretty bad WordPress site. I just gave up a that point. I wasn't a fan of WordPress and used it too much at work. Let's be honest, I didn't really need a CMS like that. I left it alone for a while but I knew I wanted my own site and I wanted more than just a portfolio, but a space of my own where I can share everything from my work, to my side projects and other ramblings.

At the agency I worked at for a few years I had the opportunity to do everything from print design to social media to websites. I rediscovered my love for the web, both design and code. I have dabbled in code since I was in middle school, maybe even elementary. Built some mini fan sites in Notepad and Dreamweaver, and well there was the MySpace era with the custom themes. I am glad my profile is gone now, no one needs to see that chaos. But, anyway, I always enjoyed building something myself.

The Graphic Design program in college required various coding classes that almost everyone hated but I loved them. After graduation, I got to work on designing websites and also helped out with modifying WordPress themes to match the client's needs. That's when I realized I missed coding but also that there was a lot that I did not know. So, I decided to go back to the basics. I already knew HTML and CSS but, did I really? I went all in on courses, blogs, tutorials, newsletters, live streams, and anything web related I could get my hands on. I learned a lot, turns out things had changed quite a bit since I was coding layouts with Photoshop slices and tables. 😉 Thankfully that is not a thing anymore. Except maybe email, but we are not going there.

As I submerged myself into all the new things in the web world I realized there were many cool things to work with. It was no longer just Bootstrap and jQuery, it was React and Vue and so many other things. It was overwhelming to be honest. I eventually found this old new thing called the Jamstack. I won't get into that just yet, that's maybe another post. The point is it got me excited to build for the web again, and that brings me here, to this site. Oof, and breathe…

The game is afoot

Most of what I write here will be about the web, design and code. However, I don't want to limit myself. I don't have a specific goal here but to share my thoughts so I will most likely ramble about many other things as well. Let's see where this goes.

If you made it to the end of my rambling, gracias, I really appreciate it. There will be many more of these ramblings and hopefully they will get better and maybe even useful for some. I'm looking forward to see where this takes me as I still have so much more I want to learn and do. Anyway, like a good friend says in her weekly newsletter… Onwards!

DEV Community: Ximena

No one knows all the things

¡Hola Mundo!

How did I get here?

The game is afoot