So, okay, the title’s a bit cheesy (and probably been used a
thousand times before) for the blog of a software developer, but after almost a
year to the day of working at Conchango this is my first blog post so it seemed
quite apt.
One of the many benefits of working here at Conchango is
that you’re surrounded by a mass of immense knowledge and experience. This was
obviously one of the things that attracted me to this company in the first
place, but I remember finding it quite daunting when I first arrived. I finally
started writing a couple of internal blog posts earlier this year about some
issues we’d worked through on my current project, but stalled when it came to
publishing this to the big wide world. Maybe I just thought there would be people
who could say more on the matter, or express a better solution or technical
explanation.
Anyway, I recently had the pleasure of attending JP
Boodhoo’s Nothin’ But .Net ‘boot camp’ course in Vancouver and it got me
thinking (a lot). I could talk all day about how good this course is both from
a technical perspective and on a personal level, but for now I just want to
focus on one point, which I why I started writing this in the first place.
One of the things
that JP encourages people not to do is put technical experts, well known
bloggers, industry ‘celebrities’ and the like on a pedestal. ‘How did you get
so good?’, ‘What’s your secret?’ etc are some of the questions that he commonly
gets asked, to which he adamantly replies that he’s no different from anyone
else. He just focused on what he knew he wanted. Once you accept that there
will always be people better than you, always someone with a different opinion
and always a different way to do something, what have you got to lose? You
should only be competing with yourself when striving for improvement.
I also realised whilst talking to a colleague recently that
the feeling of being out of my depth that I had when I first joined Conchango
has never really gone away, but instead has turned from something that is scary
and overwhelming to something that feels exciting and challenging. Knowing that
you’re constantly going to be working with new technologies, hearing new ideas
and applying new concepts is a good feeling and I don’t think that I’d want it
any other way.
So, that’s why I decided to jump in at the deep end and
write this post. I don’t know yet what will follow, but we’ve definitely been
doing some interesting things here on my current project that are worth talking
about and we’ve solved some really complex (read stressful!) problems during
the course of the last 12 months. I also intend to somehow make sense of the
intense (14 – 20 hour days!) Nothin’ But .Net course and once my mind has
recovered try to distill this information into smaller manageable pieces that I
can apply on my current project.
But that’s all to follow.
So there it is, as is rapidly becoming the norm, I’m
officially out of my comfort zone again. No turning back. Maybe someone else
will follow my lead?