devNel

Thoughts of faith and development.

Tag: development

  • The second is even harder

    So, I started this blog with the intention of putting thoughts and experiences of learning somewhere. The thing that I quickly realise in my learning journey is the challenge of figuring out what I don’t know.

    I have “dabbled” in development (PHP, JavaScript and a few others) over many years and learned a lot along the but much of it was never coherent knowledge. So then if I can’t figure out what I don’t know, how can I know if I’m good enough yet?

    There are only so many times you can take a beginners course or even struggle through an intermediate course while thinking “I know this stuff, but I’m not confident so I’m clearly not ready” before I lost my way a little. I’ve started and restarted courses many times but each time I come back to it I feel lost again. Then the imposter syndrome sets in and I mentally put myself in the “still learning, not ready” category.

    I have learned task runners, local development environments, loops, site migrations, database manipulations and so much else over the years that I often question if I really know as little as I think but then actually try to develop something, get overwhelmed and give up to pursue the next project that hasn’t lost me yet!

    What is different this time? I’m not alone and I have a plan. I have a mentor, friends reviewing my code, I’m planning my project out before I even begin to write any code and so I have a framework to follow. The best part? It’s working!

    I haven’t felt this confident in my learning journey in a long time. So I encourage you, if you’re struggling to progress in your learning – get a plan, collaborate on your code, find a mentor, find a friend. Get your code on Github or some other version control system and get them to comment on your code as issues or pull requests. You will feel far better and have somewhere to get your internal criticism out into the open to allow others to encourage you instead.

    Feel free to check out the current learning project I’m working on!

  • The first post is the hardest

    Why do this blog? To make myself write thoughts and process what I learn as I grow my ability as a developer. I plan to write, even if it’s small and even if someone else wrote a better post about what I learned.

    Why public? I work for Automattic – a fundamentally distributed organisation who also make incredible Open Source software. We code in the open – you can find much of our code, issues and discussions publically so, why not learn to embrace that? Maybe someone will also learn something valuable along the way. Even if they don’t, I’ll still become a better blogger!

    Edit: how could I forget – we’re pretty heavily about WordPress so why wouldn’t I blog with it?

    I have no idea what I’ll post just yet so let’s enjoy the ride together. What I do know is that I plan to write a post at least once every month to start.

    Also…this post was written using the “Introduce yourself (Example post)” posts that are on WordPress sites by default. Whoever came up with that – you are amazing.