Hero to Zero

If you’re learning something new within the programming world, most likely you’ll be able to find some tutorials with the title “Zero to Hero...”. It means that you'll be learning everything you need to deliver some awesome work with it, from the scratch!

Now, let me tell you an opposite story: from hero do zero!

About a year and a half ago, I was working as a developer for almost 3 years at a big company. By that time, the team was building the new version of its main software. You can probably see what this means: we were redesigning the whole architecture for the system. What a challenge!

At the same time, we wanted to migrate from the legacy no framework PHP 5.4 to a brand new monolithic Laravel application. Right from the beginning, I fell in love with Laravel and started to push myself to learn more about it day after day. This made me subscribe to Laracasts, a platform to push your web development skills to the next level. At night, I started watching Jeffrey Way diving into Laravel while washing dishes. By day, I was applying the concepts that I was learning: design patterns, tips and tricks, everything!

A year later, I was working on every step of a feature's life cycle: requirements, architecture design, coding, deploying and sometimes presenting it to clients. This hero kind of feeling started to arise - doing anything with a small amount of effort. In other words, it felt like I wasn't learning and improving my skills and myself as much as I wanted. Pure coincidence, a recruiter reached out to me with this: You'll be designing, building and maintaining APIs and workers in a microservices architecture, using Node.js and Kotlin, plus deploying your code through the CI/CD process. Quoting our beloved friend Yoda: "Much to learn, you still have"!

I have to admit: I was so scared of just thinking of moving to a different job. Even more at the time that Covid made us all go into lockdown. Everything felt so uncertain. Even though, I went for it. It was tough, but at the end of March 2020, I joined a small company, which meant: moving from a ~4k people working place and always working at the office to a completely remote startup environment. I felt I was back to zero - learning everything from scratch: new programming languages, frameworks and DevOps stuff that I had never worked before in my life. But everyone on the team was so available to share their knowledge that it kept me going, and most importantly, wanting to keep on this learning journey. The feeling of learning new things day after day and my brain having difficulties executing some tasks... It was such a good feeling! At the same time, the impostor syndrome hitting me. I think that at some point, we all go through this - time passes and you feel like you should be better by then. I still feel it sometimes.

After a year in this role, I'm back at architecture design, coding, deploying. Node.js and TypeScript became the default for my brain and I started to explore more of the JVM world with Kotlin and Spring. I learned so much in the past year and I still feel that I have so much to learn.

It's not the road from zero to hero that makes you improve. Neither the other way around. All of those different situations have a certain weight on your life's learning journey. On yourself! I'm still very eager to keep going, learning, improving but I'm also so grateful for everything and everyone. After all, learning is an ongoing process. We'll never know everything.

This is my retrospective. It doesn't mean that you have to go through all of that to feel the same. You are responsible for your path, needs and happiness.