Going Parabolic

It's been a difficult week and a half, for sure. I've had a lot of self-doubt and feelings of not belonging. Being the new guy on the team, and the least experienced by a long shot brings with it a lot of baggage. If anyone tries to tell you imposter syndrome is something made up, they are totally wrong and just haven't been put into a position that is above their skill level. There are some typical personalities on teams like this, and they've played out precisely how one would think. Some people have an attitude of knowing everything and can't remember what it was like to learn themselves, or have been doing it so long that when they started, they were still young, and think if you're learning at a later time in your life, you're a lost cause. These people are typically still using technologies that are no longer relevant and are being phased out of the ecosystem for ones that are more powerful, yet require a bit of retraining. Their stubbornness and superiority complex disallows them from learning anything new, so they cling to the things they know until they are forced into retirement. Then you have those who have risen by default into positions of leadership without actually ever had to lead a team before, and who possess none of the soft skills required to lead a team. They're typically the quiet ones who give you little information and looks that make you question your own skills. These two personalities are a dime a dozen in this industry, but I doubt they are that common in the top shelf companies.

Then, of course, you have the new generation of developer, the mostly millennial crowd, who either taught themselves or went to a bootcamp, and have been humbled by the world around them more than once. They are closer to the time when they were still learning themselves, and are more than willing to lend a helping hand, and make the rest of the team better with their imparted knowledge. They work hard, and they are taking over this industry. These are the people like my neighbor in the office, the other front end developer who has graciously taken me under his wing. I understand who to steer clear of on the team, and I know where I need to go if I want to get better and advance myself, and luckily we're on the same path, as far as what our focuses are on. Every day, he's spent nearly two hours out of his day to find some time to teach me everything I need to know to succeed in this new world for me, and within a week and a half, I've come a long way. I feel like in this short week and a half, I've learned more than I've learned in the last 3 months put together. That's not only because of what he's taught me, but also by working on an actual project, and having to find the answers to problems the hard way. There's no tutorial to hold my hand; there's a problem and I need to figure out a way to solve it. This, coupled with having a good mentor to pair program with, like Will Sentance would say, is the correct way to learn. Will calls this hard learning, and there is no substitute for it.

Since last week, I've been working on a feature for one of their sites that involves creating a portal for payment. This site already had a process that took in a quote ID and walked the user through giving their billing information, their credit card information, and then passes that information off to an API for a credit card processing company that handles the payment. They wanted something along these lines but that did not require a quote ID. So, instead it would call an API to match up the representative's ID and then take them through a form that would figure out how much their quote would be. After that, it would ask them for any referrals and collect that data, and then pass back to the original site to take them through all of their billing information, with the price already input from that form they filled out. I had this all set up, and was working on the referral part of the process today, when I called over my neighbor to have a look at it. He looked at the code, encouraged me for what I had written and then asked if he could help me clean it up a little bit. I added him as a collaborator on the Github repository and he went to work, absolutely demolishing pretty much everything I had written. But, when he had finished up, and all the while walking me through the changes, we came out with a much better way of managing state using the "useContext" hook, and the app was actually much more manageable. He had me build it back up from the bare bones that he left me with, and to my surprise, I was able to do so in the matter of about 2 hours. What had taken me almost 2 days was now incredibly easy, both because I was better than I was when I started and because of the better way of handling state. It is blowing my mind how much I'm improving, and how quickly it's happening.

Until tomorrow!