Two years and nine months in a company, what have I learned?

• Learn to learn

  Don't expect anyone to teach you, learning to learn is a vital skill in order to stay relevant and fresh. Once you are on the job, there is no teacher or syllabus given, you are the teacher and student.

  It would be nice though if you can learn more formally as a group or really have a teacher. No book learning can ever teach you experience learned as from a veteran.

• Linux and Bash

  As a developer, I owe it to myself to use other OS aside from Windows which I came to grow up with. Diversity and variety is always a welcome perspective in knowledge and system operation.

  The benefit I found the most productive about it is working with the terminal or bash. By being adept with the terminal, you can work with more flexible and detailed commands that are under your fingertip. Once I realized how fast to work with the terminal, I wanted to stay there.

• Emacs

  Not really Emacs, Vi would also do. Learning a powerful text editor, not an IDE, is an investment in the future. I plan to develop for probably the rest of my life so I need a life partner who I can make a contract with.

  For me, it was Emacs. The versatility and the concept is the selling point for me, a Lisp interpreter with a text editor. I could have chosen the focused editor Vi but speed is not my target, customization is such a sweet word for a tinkerer like me.

• Functional Programming

  As a mathematician and developer, functional programming hit home for me. During my time, object oriented and state management was a bit harder to understand in my experience. Thinking in input and output was way easier than passing messages between ill defined objects.

  Regardless of my preferences, there are newer ideas and tools I can learn that it was too good to pass up. Diversity is again welcome if not exciting.

But technical matters aside, there are more things I can be a better developer as a person.

• Due diligence

  Good lord knows I have my own mistakes during my stay. I am known to be careless and have at one time given everyone in the office administrator privilege due to a Python automation script I got narcoleptic with. I have ignored overwritten commits and have caused some backward compatibility breaks.

  I have been a bit more careful in how I proceed since. This is one thing I can never learn by myself.

• Business architecture

  Working with a group, I come to realize the inadequacy of understanding some business rules. Rather how it translates to a solution sometimes. Whereas adding a column is easy, deciding whether to add a column is something else entirely.

  If I am to live longer, I need to connect the rules with the structure. As a purist mathematician, context might be my weakness here.

• Teaching

  Not really a big point but when I did my talk at Functional JavaScript, there is something lacking in how I talk. I am enthusiastic and I do know what I am talking about, but I have talked quite a bit too fast.

  I do enjoy teaching and I do owe my fellow group leaders my share of preaching but I wonder if I really did my job. Sharing the knowledge is sharing the love.

Regardless of faults or gifts, there is one thing I do want to stress is one thing that is harder to control. Environment.

• Being the worst in a group

  If you are one of the best in the group, then you might want to consider looking for a group where you are the worst. Being the weakest in the chain keeps me on my toes. Being the greenhorn had forced to learn as much without disappointing my peers, some healthy social pressure here.

  If you are one of the best without really doing anything, then the group might not teach you anything else if you are not in a leadership position. I lament this on reading Douglas Crockford's JavaScript The Good Parts does not make you a master. That itself is a little sad.

  I want to be in a group where I can learn more but of course you can't really choose who you're with sometimes but the group can bring you up or down to their level.

• Poor management

  Whatever good hopes you have, a poor project management is obviously going to derail you have. Even if I want to teach Emacs or Functional JavaScript, the company or project may not support it despite being a labor of love and good will to others.

  The focus within a poorly managed project is just the project which is sad for everyone. I find the journey more important than the end goal.

There are more things to hinder a developer but the environment is a bit harder to control or manage itself. At the end of it all, if the environment is not suitable for growth; change it and that may mean changing places which is hard in itself. Sometimes moving on is better in the long run. Do I want to do the same things over and over again even if I get paid more? Perhaps but if it doesn't grant me a sense of happiness or purpose then I need to travel the world. Diversity and agency.

At the end of ten years, have I become an international coder? At the end of ten years, have I mastered Emacs? At the end, have I done all that I can? Only time.