What I have learned working with other developers
It’s not a secret that being part of a team might end in two potential results. One of them is that you can learn a lot from your colleagues, meaning that you are growing on both personal and professional life, while it also implies that you invest your time in watching someone else working, but you don’t produce anything. The other one is that you spend so much time with your less experienced colleagues that, in the end, you’re doing all the work and also losing the motivation on what you are doing.
After being a developer for 15 years, I found myself in a position where I can say that the best way to learn something is by doing Katas! Katas! Katas! (read more). Try something, fail on your attempt, try it again, get something functional, refactor it to improve what you did… And then, show it to someone else that you know has more knowledge, but accept their constructive criticism. It will help you to improve your knowledge and skills. And then, do it again, and keep repeating it, until you master it!
I found myself improving a lot when I accepted that I could learn from others after failing on my attempts. I listened to what they had to say, I accepted their point of views, I accepted their feedback positively (not blindly, but getting solid evidence for those opinions, with trustable sources to read more about and with enough examples), and I tried to improve what I did. And now, I am in a position that I’ve been able to teach and mentor other less experienced developers.
I also found very useful being part of a community. Start interacting with a community of developers that are working on projects that are in use by other hundreds, thousands or even millions of projects and people has been one of the best experiences of my life. It doesn’t matter if I started just posting an issue raising a bug or asking for something that was not clear to me. What it matters is that I wanted to make that project better. And I found myself sending requests to be merged into the master branches.
This article is my way to say thank you to all of those who have helped me become a better developer, finding more trustable sources of knowledge, learning from core team members of large (or not so large) communities by accepting their feedback, keeping pushing forward when I had enough time to work on those open source and personal projects, and feeling useful when others valued my opinions and examples. To all of you, thank you for allowing me to grow at your side.
And for you, that you’re reading this article, remember to keep moving forward, never stopping, investing time on your knowledge and career. Because we both know the tech world is changing very quickly, very often. And even if there are some things that you don’t like at the moment, please make an effort and consider if the actual problem is, in fact, a lack of knowledge. Because everybody fears the unknown, but some times, if you give a chance to something new, you might find a new friend that can help you improve, and you can find new technologies that can give more flexibility to your projects.
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