“For every child prodigy that you know about, at least 50 potential ones have burned out before you even heard of them.” – Itzhak Perlman
Have you ever felt like the slow developer on the team? The new guys come in with experience that you don’t have, and you start to worry if you can keep up.
I felt like I had wasted my career. All of this new technology was overwhelming. These young devs seemed to have been natural prodigies – knowing all of this stuff without even trying. They had been learning Web development from an early age, while I had spent my early career learning Microsoft Foundation Classes.
Since I felt I was so behind, I tripled my efforts to learn new programming languages, new frameworks, and new platforms. My fears were confirmed when I saw that they were learning these new things quicker than I was learning them. They had already built the foundation. And I was still getting started!
I spent extra time taking online courses, going to conferences, reading books, doing everything I could to catch up. I didn’t want to be the guy slowing down the team. But in all of my research, I learned something very important: There is no such thing as a prodigy. Everyone has to learn. No one came out of the womb knowing Spring Boot.
Then an amazing thing happened. I noticed that the code they wrote was a mess! They could put together a demo very quickly. But they couldn’t make it resilient. They didn’t know clean coding. They couldn’t refactor.
So while they were able to get things put together quickly, I was able to help them learn to slow down and make it stable. Hemmingway never released the first draft, and we should never release the first thing we write either.
So remember, that everything you do builds your skill set that can contribute to your efforts later. Your time is not wasted. There are no prodigies. We all had to work hard to learn what we know and accomplish what we do.
And if you want a shortcut to learn some refactoring techniques, you can download my free e-book Low Hanging Code Smells.