Hey visitor,
this is something, not about code as such but something I realized about myself the last months and pretty sure there's more of you who think similar.
I've written countless lines of codes, caused countless bugs, fixed them, caused new ones but all that ends up as experience. Some people ask "how do you know so much?" and the only answer is
try and error, practice and just never stop learning. However, you can only learn if there's actually people around to share their experience with you. Yes, you can learn everything the hard way yourself but many many people wouldn't work in tech todays if it wasn't for great tutorials, tutors and just an epic community all around the world.
There are people, constantly trying to help other developers some really famous and some below the radar but still doing what they can.
I planned to write about this quite a while ago but just now had the missing inspiration I needed.
Scott Hanselmann who's pretty much the most famous face of Microsoft Development published a video on TikTok. While on its own its a great advice for many people and definitely worth a watch, its the final quote of the video I liked most about it which is something I thought for quite a long while. Watch it here -> Scott @ TikTok
He finished the video with this quote:
"At the end of your career you don't want to be the one who read all the books, seen all the talks and used all the libraries. You wanna be the person who wrote the books, wrote the libraries and gave the talks"
So, whats so great about that?
I have a whole career in development, probably a bit more than 20 years to go and I thought about how to spend these years to actually create something valuable. Working on code is something thats great, enjoyable and what i'd definitely continue to do but I'm just not the typical developer anymore. I don't enjoy coding 8 hours straight for a customer, I've done that and enjoyed it but realized there has to be more i can do.
Working in tech, for your employer, your own projects and whatever else is after all one thing, experience. Errors you made, problems you fixed and yes success you had finishing that project. Theres a never ending stream of new folks joining tech and while they often can code properly, build great things they all lack experience. A 20 year old guy might be an amazing programmer but he just doesn't have a ton of experience about what can go wrong and what to look for.
At some point in my career I realized that helping other developers is actually a lot more enjoyable than working on code myself. For various reasons. First of all, helping as such is already great. Making someone's life easier is great but you're also creating way more value than by writing code yourself. Second, the feeling of getting something done or having achieved something is way stronger when you wrote a library compared to just a finished project for the next customer or the next....
So, if you're the one who gave the talk, it only took you about an hour, maybe a few hours to prepare but thats it. What you created by doing that is to actually multiply your own experience, and based on that helped to create way more things than you'd ever be able to by just coding. Plus you made other people's work day a bit more enjoyable!
Lets dig a bit deeper
If you read a lot of books, use great libraries and watch all the sessions you can watch you're probably a pretty good developer and especially in my mid 20s thats what I did to learn, practice and enhance my skills. Thats what everyone does and thats really great. However, there have to be people to actually create libraries, books and talks as otherwise there won't be content left at some point and young fellas wouldn't be able to get running.
At some point in your career you need to think about what YOU can do for your community, how you can actually multiply your experience, help others to learn from your career, help them to accept making their own mistakes and to properly learn.
Time is the most precious resource we have.
Time is something you can't increase. You can hire 10 devs but you can't get 10 additional hours. So, lets take a look at a small example to explain this.
Lets say it takes you 10 hours to build something, it also takes 10 hours to prepare a blog post and small library for this. Now if we think of this, when you work
on the project you finish it, you have a project finished and done. Thats great, nothing bad about this.
Now if you would have spend the same time to build a library or write a blog post you might not have finished the project BUT you actually did way more than that, you've enabled
other developers to do what you can do. And by that, instead of finishing that one project you helped finish countless other projects as well.
10 hours spent writing on a book might help 1000 other developers get their job done faster and easier and you actually achieved way more than you would have by just consuming and coding yourself.
Be the one who wrote the books, gave the talks and built the libraries
That said, at some point in your career you have to decide if you want to actually just quit with 65, having built a couple of possibly great projects but thats about it or if you actually enabled other developers to continue, grow and build even more projects you helped them to build.
If you're the one who wrote the books, gave the talks and built the libraries you have way more to look back at the end of your career. You'll be a lot more satisfied with what you achieved and you actually left way more in the community than you whould have by just writing code.
Code is getting old will probably be thrown away at some point and all you did is gone a few years later. If you, however, enabled other developers to become better in their job your work will probably be great years after you finished your career.
You're not good at writing or talking?
You might not enjoy talking in front of people, your writing skills might not be perfect...who cares? Mine aren't but its all about the content. As long as people can understand the point you're trying to make or understand the content you want to deliver its definitely good enough and worth to share. Don't be afraid..just start sharing! You probably can't do everything anyway, some people help by wiriting great libraries, they don't want to talk publicaly but thats totally fine, you're still helping other.
So all thats left to say... think about how you can help other developers, what you learned in your career you want to share. Everything you know can possibly help other developers so just start writing and don't be afraid to make mistakes doing that. You will make mistakes...you will learn from them and you will tell others about the problems you had. Thats a really great thing!
So..what are you waiting for, go and get some stuff written down!
Also:
Thanks Scott :)