Speaking up in standup meetings, actually designing instead of surviving
It’s been a whirlwind of a time. For the first few weeks of my employment at my new job as a junior developer, I was floundering. During standup, my teammates would speak words, but I had trouble understanding even the most basic of vocabulary. Even things I have encountered before seemed to be in a language that was completely foreign to me, not to mention all of the corporate terminology that comes with working in a business that has been around for many, many decades. To be honest, I did not think I was going to make it.
But I did. I made it a full month through and then some. Now that I have a grasp of the terminology, the concepts, and the languages used, I can finally begin to think like a developer. I can make decisions on how I want to design my code and create my functions so that they are clean and modular. I’m even able to brag a little to my coworkers about how I implemented a function so that they can use it to make the project they are working on that much easier. I have to tell you; it feels so good.
If feels good to have gone through that initial struggle of not being good at something. It feels good to be on the other side and look back, to giggle at how sad I was the first few weeks. If I had only known that I would have my small wins, I would not have worried nearly as much as I did. But of course, that’s the point. I am learning from this profession that we must get comfortable being uncomfortable. We are constantly having to learn new concepts and put them to use as if we were an expert and have been using the tools for years. We must be comfortable showing people new things and them thinking that it is magic. We must be comfortable reading documentation that is poorly written in order to find the specific sentence that we’re looking for to move forward. This is the life of a software developer, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Along the way, I have picked up some new tools to deal with the stress of managing the uncomfortable feelings. The first among them is to breathe. When given a new task that seems insurmountable, simply breathe and remember that everything that has ever been built was started with a single step. The second is something that I have mentioned before in this blog, and that is to be unafraid of asking for help. There are those that have come before me, and their struggles are worth more when they are learned from. Honor their struggles. The third tool is to have fun and don’t take everything so seriously. At the end of the day, a job is a job. If I mess up so bad and so frequently that they need to let me go to make room for someone that is more competent, so be it. There will always be other jobs, and the simple fact that I have made it this far virtually guarantees that I will be okay in the end.
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