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.

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 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.