Hello world
After years of procrastinating finally found the courage to write a blog post and hopefully after this there will be more. Hi fellow developers Navid here from the Netherlands, 34 years old. I started writing this blog item just because it was time to start (after all these years it was on item on my todolist) and because I am very curious if there are people out there with the same feelings as me. I started out of curiosity my journey in webdevelopment in the early 90's just when HTML 3 was introduced. I started with Yahoo pagebuilder, then frontpage from Microsoft, and after that I dicovered Dreamweaver. At that time I had so much fun building websites with Dreamweaver and writing HTML was just something like "how can I learn all those tags out of my head". Once I connected with a guy from internet, we became friends and I invited him to my house, he sat there and writing HTML in notepad totally out of his head. I never forget that moment I had something like "wowww, he can do this, I want that to". After that day I visited a dutch website specific about HTML and start learning it. Before I knew it, few weeks later I started writing HTML and I was soooo insanly happy I thought I was the best, that feeling when you learn new things it was just unforgettable and priceless. Weeks went by and I became better and better and start writing my first website in HTML in notepad.
Few years later
I started going to a graphic school here in The Netherlands and after that to a more technical school, where I learned programming. Years went by and the internet became more mature and more tools and programming languages became available. At this time everything was fine and I felt good and still curious and eager to learn new things. After my graduation I found a job as front-end developer at a digital agency, well dream came true, found a job about a hoby which I love. Then it started I tought I was there and knew everything I became arrogant and stopped learning. The technology became more and more mature and was left behind. It went so fast and there were so much new things out there that I wanted to learned them all (Angular, Backbone js, Laravel) it became to much and I got stressed out, call it a burn out or what so ever. After 10 years I just was slacking around and didn't actually knew what I wanted to learn, did I still want to be in this industry? I worked all these years as front-end developer to pay the bills but that was it. All the previous jobs were more the same and at some jobs I didn't even made it and had to go out after a year, just because I wasn't competent enough. This experience became a reality for me, I was finished. I was not good enough anymore and applying for new jobs didn't go well. I got rejection after rejection and had to see my old class mates making promotions at their job. I became more and more depressed and started procrastinating even more. For not feeling guilty I started to subscribe for different learning platforms but I only paid and didn't do much, I felt it didn't make sense anymore and I am far behind everyone else.
I started learning javascript back in 2018 but actually didn't learned it good enough, jumped around and stucked in tutorial hell. There so much available javascript frameworks and all of them were cool and the tooling became more and more complicated but still cool enough that I wanted to learn them. I stopped. I stopped and asked myself "is this what I want to do?", Do I still want to jump around from new tech to new tech and and learn nothing end of the line. That was the moment I stopped and realise if I continue doing this again I won't make any progress. I started resetting myself and my knowledge. I went finding a mentor for myself and I am starting java now.
Reset
For me it was important to start all over again an gain new knowledge and start from the basics. I wanted to learn a programming language which is solid and therefore I choose Java. It was important to leave javascript behind and go for a language which has more structure and is Object Oriented in his nature. Also I will start blogging about what I learned here at dev.to and share my knowledge, things I didn't wanted untill now. I really looking forward to this period and will enjoy it as much as I can because afterall that is the most important thing.
I am really curious what you guys thing about this item and if you have kind same problems and challenges like me. Really looking forward to hear from you.
Top comments (2)
Hi Navid,
thanks for sharing your story.
Yeah I know your situation very well, i had to same feeling at my work
and so, same as you started a new language and left the comfort zone. Yeah its really hard to encounter problems where you know "dammit in my other language this would not be a f*ckn problem" its sometimes really depressing but the main takeaway is not to give up, yeah this is hard (had it many times).
I try to say to myself that the most important thing is to never stop learning. And this is done the best way by leaving the comfort zone.
Good luck with your journey Navid, you are never alone on this adventure (sometimes it looks like, but never is)
Tnx for the reply mate. Yes it feels like that sometimes you are on your own but reading this kind of stories like you makes me feel better. Good to know that you left your comfort zone and find the right direction once again. Goodluck to you my friend!