7 min. read
Today is an interesting day. I deal with a lot of personal stuff that I frankly won’t repeat on here, but let’s just say that I was told the same thing again for the 1,874th time today. What changed? I kind of thought about where I am in life right now.
Now, why would I be doing that? I’m a high school student trying to apply to college and figure out how to navigate the world. Well, I don’t know. I take things very personally and therefore do a lot of self-reflection almost all the time, at least whenever I have a moment to myself. And the conclusion I came to was that I don’t really need to be doing anything differently.
Why is this important?
Because a few weeks ago, some developer reached out to me on Discord and complimented me on all the work I’ve been doing. He says he appreciates all of the things I’ve made (for free) over the years. I thanked him and shared with him the benchmarking tool I was working on at the time, and he said he would “send it to all of his developer friends” and thanked me for sharing it with him.
Today’s post is a bit personal, but the theme is: Keep Moving Forward. I’m going to pinpoint a lot of key feelings some developers may be having out there, ridicule myself a bit without revealing anything too deep, and then try and tie it back to the key message. Keep in mind that I am a terrible writer, so my bad if it gets confusing.
There comes a time in your career where you stop and think about whether you actually think you can make it. You think about how insignificant you are in the grand scheme of things, compared to the 8 billion other meat bags on this blue sphere, and the 330 million other meat bags on this gigantic land mass.
This is especially true for software developers, given our minimal bipedal movement and addiction to blue light screens. Most of the truly dedicated ones that do this because they enjoy it do, at least. We sit, staring at the computer screen, typing away, thinking about where we will be in the next year.
After the “AI Bubble” began getting bigger these last few years, things were especially scary for us. But we all kept on working on our jobs, our hobbies, our side projects, our startups, our companies. We kept moving forward.
Sometimes things get big, or seem shocking. But that’s just how the tech industry is. It is designed to make you feel hopeless all the time, that you will be replaced or discarded. Every developer is unique, mixing in their own little personalities with their typing habits and creative processes. As long as you keep moving forward, you’ll be alright.
One of my close friends once told me that I sometimes “talk without listening.” I think that a lot of developers do that too as well. We exist in this community trying to spew out and debate on technical knowledge, constantly correcting eachother and figuring out which way is the best way to code. Sometimes we need to remember not to cross-apply our professional habits with our personal ones as well, and sometimes we just need to keep trying to move forward and become better.
Like I said earlier, I deal with a lot of personal stuff all the time. To peek a little bit, I’m extremely loud. That sounds ironic because this job is meant for introverts, but I am extremely energetic and very obnoxious. I was described as narcissistic, weird, and “messy” for a while and it (still) gets on my nerves quite a bit. Typing this out and publishing it for a bunch of randos across the world is one of the many ways I self-reflect. It’s mostly because I’m both extremely anxious and very excited about everything, and mostly just want to feel included in some type of way.
My journey through all of that was long, private, and something not meant to be elaborated on here. But one thing I always did was keep moving forward. Even if you really don’t want to, you have to keep moving forward. The same is true for whatever shit you’re dealing with outside of your workplace. I know life isn’t sunshine and flowers for you right now. It isn’t for anyone. We all want things we don’t have, and we probably won’t ever get them for at least a very long time.
Coding has always been one of the best coping mechanisms for any kind of problems I have in my personal life. People that know me see me do it all the time. That’s because I’m stressed all the fucking time. The other is being extremely insensitive and oversharing about my own problems, like I’m doing right now, in order to make myself feel heard. Coding has this consistent feeling of knowing that everything is going to work exactly the way that you make it work. It has a specific set of rules, a kind of prediction, something that shouldn’t go wrong. This sounds crazy, but it’s like talking to a person that does exactly what you want them to.
Yet, we still need to keep moving forward, moving on, continuing the race. My favorite quote from my favoite book is, “You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others.” The real meaning behind this quote is that adversity will be thrown everywhere and you need to deal with it. The literal definition also has started to have widespread applications given the fact that I walked into a classroom today and was simulatenously booed and cheered. The same is true in the professional world. Someone once laughed in a VC for a solid 30 seconds when he read my CV. But I kept moving forward and continued the race.
I didn’t know what kind of developer I wanted to be until exactly one year ago. I got into coding because I thought I was smart enough to market and grow a Discord Server that would somehow become profitable. Even before then I had thought it was possible to make money off Scratch. Starting with those two tools threw me into different ecosystems until I started making Minecraft Plugins and was thrown into the Java Ecosystem.
Being in the Spigot ecosystem was appealing at first, but it slowly started to lose its novelty. The Minecraft Modding and Plugin community carries a lot of history and drama with it, from the Bukkit fiasco to the reasoning behind NeoForge’s existence (feel free to looks those up - very interesting!). A lot of things that we developers wanted to see were usually met with a “who will implement this” or a “this isn’t technically feasible.”
That eventually got me into Kotlin, which is kind of where I am now. I made a game in Kotlin in an interesting game engine and then decided to make my own game engine in C. I’ve been thrown around a lot of different communities because I didn’t really know where to go.
Point is, I kept moving forward. I revisit my “future document” every now and then, to at least try and not stray too far from what I’m doing right now. At minimum I want to start being marketable again. I created a dev instagram where I spontanously post random developer things. I personally plan out almost everything I do, professional and personal, but also have gotten really good at improvising when it (almost always) doesn’t work. When you have a “creativity cramp,” whatever that means, just do what feels right for you. Move forward in the direction that works for you.
This was kind of a dump that I did at night because I felt like typing how I felt right now. Maybe this blunt, straight-to-the-point and terribly directioned writing is something I should do more often.
If you feel like you don’t know where to go, don’t think it works in your life right now, or don’t believe in yourself, then just keep moving forward. You will be fine. Do what feels good for you. I have, and I’m in a somewhat decent good place. We’ll see where life takes us, my friend.