Thank you so much for sharing this post, Alex! These are all wonderful life lessons!
If I may, here's one life lesson that I think has helped me along my path-- it relates to your "Keep Learning" point: Often times in our programming careers, in the beginning everything starts as being fresh and shiny. And the excitement is abundant. But as the months (and maybe even years) drag on, we might fall into a rut. Maybe we work in a pretty specialized silo in the company somewhere and spend all our days working with proprietary APIs. Of firefighting/log-scraping/playing a lot of "hero-ball." Or whatever. Of course, it's wonderful if you're a weekend code warrior and love to dabble in side-projects. Or maybe in one's spare time, you love reading TypeScript documentation or the latest ECMAScript annual release notes. But for others juggling families, other priorities, newborn kids (or other parental unit responsibilities), one trick I've found that's served me well is to always keep trying to think of new ways of accomplishing old tasks and asks. We don't always get to choose how we spend our free time. (Or have the mental wherewithal to open up another front, so to speak.) But during our work time while you're sitting there in your tiny cubicle facing the ventilation shaft or wherever, if you have some free rein, maybe you can write a clever parser in JavaScript/learn regex better in Google Sheets to do that data entry drudgery. Or try using vanilla JS instead of React when you're building that next login/navbar component. So on, so forth. The world is full of wonders and marvels; it's all right there! Sometimes, we just need to reach for it to keep the spark alive. 🙂
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Thank you so much for sharing this post, Alex! These are all wonderful life lessons!
If I may, here's one life lesson that I think has helped me along my path-- it relates to your "Keep Learning" point: Often times in our programming careers, in the beginning everything starts as being fresh and shiny. And the excitement is abundant. But as the months (and maybe even years) drag on, we might fall into a rut. Maybe we work in a pretty specialized silo in the company somewhere and spend all our days working with proprietary APIs. Of firefighting/log-scraping/playing a lot of "hero-ball." Or whatever. Of course, it's wonderful if you're a weekend code warrior and love to dabble in side-projects. Or maybe in one's spare time, you love reading TypeScript documentation or the latest ECMAScript annual release notes. But for others juggling families, other priorities, newborn kids (or other parental unit responsibilities), one trick I've found that's served me well is to always keep trying to think of new ways of accomplishing old tasks and asks. We don't always get to choose how we spend our free time. (Or have the mental wherewithal to open up another front, so to speak.) But during our work time while you're sitting there in your tiny cubicle facing the ventilation shaft or wherever, if you have some free rein, maybe you can write a clever parser in JavaScript/learn regex better in Google Sheets to do that data entry drudgery. Or try using vanilla JS instead of React when you're building that next login/navbar component. So on, so forth. The world is full of wonders and marvels; it's all right there! Sometimes, we just need to reach for it to keep the spark alive. 🙂