I started my career as a web developer in Sapient Nitro a year back, as a Junior Interactive Developer, which is a fancy sugar coating on a Trainee, really. For the first 6 months I was tested through my patience, nights, self doubts, friends earning tripple / quadruple. On one particularly gloomy, night when only a yellow CFL was on in the room, I’d decided that I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I’d packed my bags and was staring at an airline’s cheapest flights to go back home. I don’t have sort of friends who can have my back, hell I don’t even know how can I have my back. So there was sorta no support as well.

Now I think of it, had I acted upon that fear and initimidation, I’d have been in a worse off because of two reasons

  1. Things in the family were going to go off the charts crazy, like ripping people’s lives and minds off crazy.

  2. I’d not have been able to see my face very often in the mirror.

So coming back to point, I stuck on the hope and I’m in a better place. I give talks in meetups, discuss with people, learn from them. BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, as I’d had this revelation only lately, I learn the most by coming back to the things that I didn’t understand the first time I read them. The time of returning may range from some minutes, hours, days, weeks, even months. Those are the kind of things that just stick in the mind unlike anything else.

Learning web development, all the patterns nuances, best practices and more, and working on a team that’s developing a framework solution for a particular need in the company, I realized that I learnt the most when I got back to things that were left Un-Understood at some point of time. As Preeti says in her latest article, that one has to get head around some thing, by repeatedly reading about it before trying hands on.

I think this is common pattern in the developers in their starting year or so. And as people start gaining experience, there are fewer instances in time, when developers aren’t able to understand something in the first go of the read. There’s that muscle memory that builds while going through the pain of debugging and understanding the not understood. It’s a bitter sweet pain. When that son of a sweet gun concept or bug is cleared, one gets a push to go forward automatically. It’s like a self sustaining feedback, but only if one is able to sustain initially through the frustration.

It’s been a good ride til now. I’m not caring for not making too much money because of the learning I’m getting out of things. Perhaps that’ll pay back sometime in the future. Hopes are always up.