Hello, fellow devs 👋, if you could change one thing about your dev career so far, or could improve one thing from it, what would it be?
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Top comments (10)
I'd focus on truly understanding how stuff works before implementing them.
I started working in my late teens but most of that work was pasting jQuery stuff without properly knowing how JavaScript worked. I'd just be happy that a hover or
.show()worked and moved to the next task at hand.That got me paid but I only started making real progress in my career when I started learning the basics and actually paying attention to what I was adding to the codebase.
Thanks for sharing Vitor! Yeah, I was also caught in this trap sometimes of just trying to get things done, instead of trying to also get a deep understanding of how things work.
I think people that enjoy being productive sometimes suffer from this.
For me, it would be asking more questions and talking more to people. At the beginning of my career I was too focused on the technical aspects, and getting the technical parts right. I was also very "proud" of doing those things on my own, and this way I missed lots of learning opportunities.
At that point, that seemed like the logical thing to do, getting the technical parts right (was also the most challenging thing to do).
But I realised talking more to people, asking more questions, or even discussing daily challenges would have been more valuable in te long run, and I could have learned more from others.
Nothing!
Because as with everything in life, "it is what it is" ... there's no use theoreticizing "if only I had bought bitcoins, or Apple stocks or whatever, in 2000", because you can't predict what would have happened then - maybe you would have been rich and happy, or maybe you would have been rich, and UNhappy :-)
You can't predict things in life, just take them as they come and live "in the moment", I guess that's my point.
P.S. okay then - if I would really have taken a different decision in early life it might have been to go into theoretical physics instead of software, but I can't be sure if THAT would have been a good decision - I probably wouldn't have had the necessary talent for it!
Thanks for sharing! Agree on the - it is what it is part! Surely it's not obvious that having done things a certain way would have lead to success. And success is also subjective.
The target here is to learn from others.
Exactly, you can't really plan or "make" life, it's one big adventure, you'll never know what you come across and that's how things are invented and progress is made ... except maybe when you're the son or daughter of a millionaire or billionaire and your life course is charted from cradle to grave, but to me that sounds utterly boring :-)
But, I do recognize (of course) that there are "best practices" and you shouldn't ignore the wisdom that's out there - don't reinvent the wheel and always think you know better, learn from others and especially from experts ... but, the path you take through life and the decisions you take are your own.
So far it seems I did everything I could, and have taken tips from various sources. I am very satisfied with my progress in the past two years of learning. :)
But if you are talking about "regrets" here, like things we could have done but we didn't do, for me personally is that I should have explored further in computer in general or math, so I have a better basics. Now I decided to dig deeper in computer science and found my math is crappy to even understand the textbook. T_T
But since I can't change the past.... I can only do better in the future. So I will take some time to make up for those basics, which many people say can benefit me in the long term.
Nope, I don't really mean regrets, I mean one thing that could have been done better. Without retrospecting or feedback from others it's hard to evolve.
Nice to see that you are taking a look back at CS, but I have quite the opposite impression on this. I think it's more valuable to work in the field, see the pain points,then study the CS thing that can help you do that.
For ex: memory management - not a very hot topic as we have GC baked into the language runtimes we use (most of them). But if you found that it's a big pain point for mobile users, because they can't navigate memory intensive websites, would be worth checking out and see if you can inovate in this area.
yeah... but often I found that, due to the lack of those basic knowledge, sometimes I don't even know WHERE the problem is. While people with CS background, while not familiar with my field, have a better hunch of what's wrong.
Of course, to learn or not to learn this is totally due to personal choice. I have to admit that it is not as interesting as web development itself, which is understandable why not many choose to study CS at the first place. :P
Apply for some small agency jobs and/or do a bootcamp instead of doing mostly all self-taught and freelance stuff.