I've been a professional developer for 10 years. I've built roughly 7 production applications in that time. Just writing that makes me cringe a little—shouldn't it be more? But those 7 applications represent real users, real business needs, real maintenance, and real updates, especially when APIs break or I forget to include something and the application crashes. They're production systems that people depend on. And somehow, I still don't feel like a "real developer."
I feel inadequate because with every new project, I have to Google things I've done several times. Things I feel a seasoned developer would know off the top of their head. I'm always looking for boilerplate code so I don't have to type the same HTML tags over and over again. I'm very thankful for reusable components. On more than a few occasions, I've had to look up the right tag to connect a CSS stylesheet. It feels like those moments when you forget how to spell the word "of"—I hope I'm not the only one who does that! I never seem to remember what dependency injection is, even though I search it up with every new project. Then there are things that come up several times per project, and each time I have to look them up. Creating modals and how to implement them is one example.
I'm writing this blog to say to myself and others that this is okay. Yes, I could have studied harder. I could have studied more. But the work I've done isn't worthless. There are programmers who don't understand everything or don't know how everything is connected because frameworks abstract things to make programming easier but understanding harder. The projects still got done. The end result is that they've made other people's jobs easier or more efficient, and that alone should be considered a victory. Another reason I'm writing this is to let go of the fear—the fear of looking stupid and foolish, the fear of being called a phony or a noob. This fear has kept me from applying for higher-paying jobs or more challenging positions because I might have to do a coding test or whiteboard interview. This is me letting go of those fears, ready to try new things, ready to fail, to make mistakes and learn from them. I may be a little long in the tooth, but it's never too late to reinvent yourself and put your best foot forward.
You might ask what changed. Over time I have changed and grown and come to new perspectives but one thing stands out, I finally realized that I've been waiting to feel "ready" for years. I've been treating looking things up as a weakness instead of just... how development works. It's like a lot of things in life—if you wait for the perfect moment, you'll be waiting for a long time. With all that said, I'm hoping you'll hear from me more. At work, I'm transitioning from ASP.NET to Django because the company wants to use Python. I'm hoping to journal about this transition and write about the joys and struggles as I work my way through the muck and mire of being a developer.
— Figuring it out as I go.
Until next time.
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