10 years of web development; 10 life lessons.

Soured from my blog

Ten years ago (2009) the economic recession was in full swing. Every week another bank would collapse, millions of homes would go into foreclosure proceedings, and I started my career as a professional web developer. With a degree in hand and a little hobby experience, I set out into the cruel, cruel job market.

Anyone know what this is?

It took nearly 6 months to find my first role as a 'jr web developer'. Later finding out I was the only candidate that could create a working submit form. Yea, 4 year degree to show off something I knew _before_ university. Soon, I'll be a Infra-Engineer for a payment processor after spending a couple years in the SRE/DevOps consulting realm. Here are the 10 lessons I have learned over the last 10 years the in information technology.

• Knowledge is a resource best shared.
• The end user is always correct; conversely, the end user is never correct.
• The end user will always find a way to use your program differently than intended.
• If you know more about a subject than everyone else in the room, you are the expert.
• You are your own best champion. No one knows your strengths and weaknesses better than you. Put yourself where you want to be.
• Learn something new every day; the results are compounding.
• Break complex systems into small single focus pieces. Systems are easier to understand, manipulate, and iterate as small pieces.
• Ignore the imposter syndrome feelings, no one knows everything about everything.
• Everything is an abstraction. Understand the low level means you automatically understand 1/2 the higher level abstractions.

So many things, so complicated.

So there you go. Successes, failures, hard won battles, and easily lost fights. Distilled down to 10 learned lessons. So how about you, any lessons you have learned in the past decade you can share?

Photo by Matthew Fournier on Unsplash.

Comments

[Andrew Brown 🇨🇦]

It took 3 years of self-study from my small town and it took moving to a non-English speaking country contributing lots of free work upfront to break into the industry.

I had tried getting a job in Toronto, didn't have the CompSci degree when that's all they looked at for hiring. Toronto is behind the times, and still kind of is.

I myself feel that I repeat the advice that I have learned in my 15-year dev career so I've been outlining and documenting at it all. Just a sneak peek:

1. Eat Shit And Ask For More
2. Ship Mistakes
3. You Don’t Scrum? You’re Dumb
4. Ignore You Parents
5. You Don’t Have To Like The Person You Work With
6. Get Infront Of The Problem
7. It's Not My Job To Convince You
8. Business Is Personal
9. Volunteering is Mandatory
10. Don’t Guard Your Time, Be Available
11. You’re Already Late
12. Nobody Asked For Your Help
13. Listen To Me I Am The King
14. Do What You Hate And Be the Best At It
15. Doing The Work Only Half The Job, The Other Half Is Telling Others You Did The Work.
16. Putting A Leash On Your Enemies
17. Copying Other People Mistakes
18. The Roulette Strategy to Keeping Traction
19. Not Having The Luxury Figuring Out What I Want To Do
20. Consistency and Adjusting to meet your goals is the Hardest Thing
21. You Have Time, You Just Don’t Want To Give It
22. Lack of Trust Is A Death Sentence
23. Saturdays Are For Rich Kids
24. Value Cannot Be Automated
25. To Go Faster, You Must Go Slower

[David J Eddy]

15 Can not be over stated. 'Good work not exemplified is work done good enough.'

[Eduardo Uribe]

Hey David, thanks for taking the time to share this.

[David J Eddy]

Any time Eduardo. :D

[Angela Whisnant]

This is awesome David! Thanks for sharing your wisdom. 😎