During a conversation with another developer friend of mine, an idea to create this hit me. I think we all have days where we can identify with this to some extent.
When you think about it, a lot of what we do/feel as developers falls into these buckets. Or heck maybe it’s just me. (Please tell me it’s not just me .. It’s just me right guys? Um, guys?)
Shock
I have had those moments where I’m in shock (a bit) that I was able to cobble together a certain piece of code. Granted this happens to me less often than it used to but I still look back on some things I’ve done and think, “Man that was pretty cool! I’m shocked that it was ME that did that!”
Shame
There are of course that I see some code I’ve done that needs .. shall we say it with a buzzword folks? … “refactoring”. That’s a nice way to say, “The doggie left a gift on the floor, he did his best, but it still needs cleaned up, the floors scrubbed and the doggie needs to be shown how not to make that mess again”. No offense to pooches anywhere.
Hope
Lastly, we all get stuck. And I for one am so thankful for StackoverFlow. My buddies and I who are a bit older, have often mentioned “What did we do before StackoverFlow?”. The answer is we had lots and LOTs of books. The interwebz has changed so much for developers and good ol’ StackoverFlow .. I hope you’re around for a long time. A tankard of ale be raised in your honor!
So this developer life can be quite crazy. Sometimes you just have to keep building, remember that none of us our perfect. We’re just human-folk after all.
Remember, there is a great community out there, some nice folks (and yeah some snarky folks too) but all-in-all a helpful lot.
Connect with them, be a part of a larger community, never be “the guy/gal in the room” as they say. Go to local developer events and see what’s out there. If you’re in my neck of the woods, St Louis Days of .NET is a great event to attend.
That’s it from me till next week. So far, thanks to John Sonmez over at Simple Programmer, I am keeping my commitment this year to blogging once a week.
See you next week!
Stay geeky my friends.