# The Journey of the mediocre programmer
## How we got here
-You have your own unique story of how you got here as a programmer. Whether you found out about programming as a curious child who wanted to see what the computer could do, or as an adult who heard that there were these things called computers that you could program, you had a journey to get to this point. And you learned a certain amount to get here. You spent your free time learning how to code or you were fortunate to be able to work on programming as part of your job. You went to school to learn more about programming or you took training classes. You bought books or read articles online to learn more about programming. Whatever the path you took you started the journey as a programmer.
+You have your own unique story of how you got here as a programmer. You might have found out about programming as a curious child who wanted to see what the computer could do. Or you could have arrived as an adult who heard about these things called computers that you could program. Whatever the case, you had a journey to get to this point, and you learned a certain amount to get here. You spent your free time learning how to code, or you were fortunate to be able to work on programming as part of your job. You went to school to learn more about programming or you took training classes. You bought books or read articles online to learn more about programming. Whatever the path you took you started the journey as a programmer.
And now you feel stuck.
You look around and wonder if you'll ever know everything that you should know. You read an article on a site and your interest is piqued. A friend online mentions this neat thing that they've found and expects that you will learn more about it. Your colleague found something that might solve an issue you're having at work on a project and now you have one more thing to learn.
-Perhaps you're seeing new things show up in job postings with a minimum of 3+ years of required experience and you're wondering how anyone would have that level of experience yet. Or you chose to ignore that thing for a while and now it's become a driving factor in your domain of work. It's as if someone flipped a bit somewhere and now you're suddenly unworthy of being called a programmer unless you know this thing.
+New topics and technologies seem to emerge almost weekly. These "things" creep into programming discussions and our work. Perhaps you're seeing these new things show up in job postings with a minimum of 3+ years of required experience and you're wondering how anyone could have that level of experience. Or you chose to ignore these things for a while and now they've become a driving factor in your work. It's as if someone flipped a bit and now you're unworthy of being called a programmer unless you were an early adopter of these things.
Each of these experiences causes you to feel as though you are incomplete without learning these new things. They show us that no matter our current experience there are still gaps in our knowledge that must be filled. As you look to the horizon you can see the gaps that creep up in between where you are and where you think you should be.
## The Gap
-I've chosen the word "gap" to describe the difference between where you are now and where you think you should be for good reason. A gap is something imposed by others, whether by force or by neglect. If a gap appears in your garden fence it means the fence is weaker at protecting the garden. A gap can also be something that requires our attention. "Mind the gap" is a phrase coined in the late 1960s by the London Underground to warn folks of the space between the platform and the train cars. If someone weren't careful around that gap it could lead to an unsafe situation.
+I've chosen the word "gap" to describe the difference between where you are now and where you think you should be for good reason. A gap is something imposed by others, whether by force or by neglect. If a gap appears in your garden fence it means the fence is weaker at protecting the garden. A gap can also be something that requires our attention. "Mind the gap" is a phrase coined in the late 1960s by the London Underground to warn folks of the space between the platform and the train cars. If people aren't careful around that gap it could lead to an unsafe situation.
The gap in this case is the distance between our current abilities and where we think we should be. Sometimes the gaps are self-imposed because of our desires to improve ourselves, but more often the gap is externally imposed.
One of the biggest creators of gaps in our programming career is change. As programmers we are fully aware of the cycle of change in programming culture. We're constantly having changes thrown at us: changing technology, changing priorities at work, or even changing our strategies to try to keep up with the demands made of us.
-Change can also come from within our community. Our community of developers and users could move on to a new technology; whether for personal or professional reasons. We may no longer get the support we need to do our jobs and be faced with the prospect that we too need to update our skills or be left behind in an abandoned community.
+Change can also come from within our community. Our community of programmers and users could move on to new positions and new technologies. We may no longer get the support we need to do our jobs and be faced with the prospect that we too need to update our skills or be left behind in an abandoned community.
-Change can lead to stress. Stress is prevalent in programmer circles because things are often changing. What worked on Friday afternoon can be broken on Monday morning because of a change to a library that we were using. Our development environment could break because of an upgrade that didn't apply properly. Production might need security fixes and those fixes mean we have to redo a major piece of our software because it no longer works. There are plenty of ways in which we are kept in a cycle of change.
+Change can lead to stress. Stress is prevalent in programmer circles because things are often changing. What worked on Friday afternoon can be broken on Monday morning because of a change to a library that we were using. Our development environment could break because of an upgrade that didn't apply properly. Production might need security fixes, and those fixes mean we have to redo a major piece of our software because it no longer works. There are plenty of ways in which we are kept in a cycle of change.
-Not all change is because of bad events happening. The software that we use could have very good reasons for changing. New features can be introduced that require new ways of thinking about your code. Security fixes may mean that our systems are more resilient to outside attacks, but require different ways of using that system. New and better optimizations may lead to our code running faster but need a few tweaks to take advantage of those speed benefits. A refactor of an API can lead to cleaner and more concise ways of interacting with another system, but those changes are not backward-compatible with current code. Change can be positive.
+Not all change is bad. The software that we use could have very good reasons for changing. New features might be introduced that require new ways of thinking about your code. Security fixes may mean that our systems are more resilient to outside attacks, but require different ways of using that system. New and better optimizations may lead to our code running faster but needing a few tweaks to take advantage of those speed benefits. A refactor of an API can lead to cleaner and more concise ways of interacting with another system, but introduce changes that are not backward-compatible with current code.
-But change requires time and effort in order to adapt to it. The gap can only be closed if we have the resources and time to work on it. If we're struggling with our current workload and someone changes how something works we now have to budget our time to adapt to that change. If our mental-muscle-memory knows how something works and that has significant change it requires us to re-train our mental model of how that thing works. And if you're already feeling like you don't understand the systems and environment that you're working on then adding additional change can leave you feeling stranded among the newly-formed gaps in your knowledge.
+Change can be positive, but change requires time and effort in order to adapt to it. The gap can only be closed if we have the resources and time to work on it. If we're struggling with our current workload and someone changes how something works we now have to budget our time to adapt to that change. If our mental-muscle-memory knew how something worked and is now faced with a significant change it requires us to re-train our mental model of how that thing works. And if you're already feeling like you don't understand the systems and environments that you're working on then adding additional change can leave you feeling stranded among the newly-formed gaps in your knowledge.
## Closing The Gap
projects / themediocreprogrammer.git / blobdiff