Developer Diaries: Week 13 | Celebrating the wins

If anyone is following closely, you might have noticed I missed last week! Sorry about that - was a bit of a crazy week. But as I prepped for this week (realizing it's technically week 14 as a developer), I thought writing about how I was actually able to set up an new app to run locally almost all by myself, and was I like "I've come so far!" and took a little moment to celebrate.

It reminded me that we all need to take a moment to celebrate the wins, and I think as developers we don't do that enough. We go from solving one bug to jumping to the next. We come up with ideas left and right and implement them as quick as we can.

And then sometimes, we just have those days where it feels like NOTHING we did worked, and maybe we don't even know what we're doing. You know it - imposter syndrome. On days that like these, I find it helpful to reference a list of things I can do that I know even when I have those down days, I've still come along way.

So I'm going to list out some things that I can do now that I couldn't do 13 (er, technically 14) weeks ago. This post might not be useful for anyone else except myself - although I hope it will encourage each of you to do the same, no matter where you are at in your developer journey.

• Using Github desktop
• Running new apps locally (for the first time!)
• Catching bugs/problems/areas of improvement in code reviews (admittedly, this still doesn't happen much)
• Create a utility function and being able to reference it in multiple places in my apps
• Create a React App Project and build a landing page completely from scratch with components in less than 2 hours. (Here it is)
• Create tests with Jest (for both frontend AND API)
• Sign git commits
• Upgrade dependencies
• Understand the difference between Sprint and Kanban view in Zube
• Regex for replacing special characters with "_"
• A javascript function that doesn't require me to write regex to replace special characters :)

Things I still can't do?

• Spell component right on the first try.
• Explain what this is and how it works
• Get the right audio source on zoom