Noticeable improvement in abilities?
Lately I’ve been doing work on a php site. It’s my first big php site and I am really enjoying it. It doesn’t bother me that I’ve never done any php on this scope before though because of something I’ve been learning recently.
I am a capable of being a successful programmer.
Maybe after 7+ years of development time on multi-million dollar applications with teams ranging in size from 2 developers to 40+ developers I would have figured that out already.
I hadn’t though.
I’ve always had confidence issues, and that didn’t change when it came to development and programming.
There has never been a situation in my career where I couldn’t figure something out. Maybe I’m a little weak in certain areas of development (game development comes to mind), but I can’t say that I’ve ever truly failed to grasp a programming concept.
I’m notoriously bad at “talking tech” to the point that I once failed to answer the question “What is the Session?” in an ASP.Net interview. This was after having spent 4 years doing ASP 3.0 and ASP.Net development. My nerves are a killer in interviews that is for sure.
However, with the time I spent unemployed and trying out all these new technologies and programming languages, I learned a little bit about myself. I learned that I have the ability to succeed. I don’t think I’ll ever be the type of developer that will argue over memory allocation and worry about which bits are flipped by which bytes, but working in so many different languages has really helped me progress.
I look forward to learning more languages and continuing to work with new technologies. I’m very interested in learning Python and becoming a “script kiddie” all over again.