Tag: advice

What follows is a comment I wrote on Link-Din to a future software developer looking for advice:

Have fun first.

Don’t choose some technology because people / job specs tell you that you should use it.

Explore different languages. Build little projects in those different languages.

Build your own personal website and blog about your learning.

If you go into development using react because that what people / bootcamps told you, then you will be a react developer for a while.

Im not saying thats a bad thing, but if you dont like what you’re using and only use it because you were told you should, you will soon be in the position of hating a job that you need to pay the bills.

Oh and dont listen to people who tell you that you MUST use “ai” in order to be a professional.

Learn for yourself and chart your progress. Just try and be a little better at the job than you were yesterday.

Best of luck in your journey.

Pockets of time

When you’re young, free and single you don’t realise how much free time you have.

“Don’t have time for that” shouldn’t have even been in my vocabulary.

When you meet someone and start getting serious, you will probably start seeing them most evenings and / or weekends.

Despite enjoying the time spent with your new partner, you will remember just how much extra time you had for those pursuits.

Then you move in together and perhaps get married.

You may then start to reminisce about those evenings every other day when your time was all your own to do with as you wished.

Staying up till 3 am to play video games? No problem!

And then you may have a child together.

Now yours and your partner’s every waking moment is there to make sure that your child is happy, healthy and loved.

They have no past memories.

They are a clean slate.

Their time for pursuits and discovery is in front of them.

When you are woken at random times in the middle of the night, which then makes you too tired in the day, you will remember how much time your partner and you had before your bundle of joy arrived.

And then the second one arrives.

You will start to reminisce over how much time you actually had during nap times. And at night when your first one started sleeping through the night finally.

Now it’s just small pockets of time.

Concentrated moments for you to really focus in on the things that you want to pursue for yourself.

I’m lucky.

I found the person I’m happy and grateful to be spending the rest of my life with.

And we’ve been blessed to have brought two perfect children into the world.

I love my life now.

This is a post for my children to read when they are old enough.

I want them to consider the path they choose to walk — with whoever they hope to walk it with.

I want them to know that if they find the right person as I did, then the sacrifices are merely exchanges; upgrades to an even better, more fulfilling life.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us

Gandalf — The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Throwing mud up a wall

In my experience, learning is like throwing mud up a wall. On the first throw some will stick and some will fall off. Then on the second throw more will stick and so on and so on.

Whatever it is you want to learn or create, there really is no substitute for lots of hard work and practice. When first starting out you may cringe at what you have produced or may even find yourself comparing your work to that of much more experienced people, convinced that you’ll never be as good as them.

Nevertheless continue.

Keep on down your chosen path and if you feel the end is getting no closer to you, then you’ll have learnt a very important lesson in learning itself – the end of the path should never be reached.

If you get to a point where you truly believe that you have learned everything that you need to know, you’ll stop trying and, ultimately, stop caring.

Never let this happen.

You should keep throwing mud up the wall, metaphorically speaking, and when you think the wall is well and truly covered, move round to the opposite side and continue.

Just keep learning, keep getting excited about what it is you do, and keep working hard.

The people you admire and compare yourself against will have, and probably still are, going through similar thought processes to your own. They themselves will have their own heroes whose admiration they’ll seek and to whom they will compare themselves.

And who knows, keep working hard and you may just have people looking to you for inspiration in the near future.