I spent a lot of time, probably way too much of it, watching the start-up scene and getting a feel for the current trends of what’s hot and what’s not¹. Increasingly I find myself on the other side of the fence since I’m wholeheartedly a Microsoft supporter and everyone else seems to be into Linux, Rails and varying forms of Javascript like Node.JS. Sure there’s a great many websites built on these frameworks and the stuff people are able to churn out with them in seemingly little time at all certainly makes me feel like a total idiot when I’m floundering around in ASP.NET. But in reality those proclaiming that they created these things in just a weekend or could deploy a new app within minutes are often hiding one crucial fact from you.
The multiple years of experience that came prior to it.
It’s no secret that whilst I’ve been developing for a long time I’m no rockstar when it comes to the world of web programming. Indeed my first foray into this world was a bastard of a page that was lucky not to fall on its face constantly and the experience had me running to find better solutions, eventually falling to Silverlight. The reason for this was obvious, it allowed me to leverage my desktop development experience into a new platform. Sure I struggled with the ideas that just couldn’t be boiled down into the desktop world (like that whole REST thing) but it was a quick way to get myself into this world and expand from there.
So of course when I saw people saying they built this incredible website in only a weekend when it took me several months worth of weekends just to get mine working I was intrigued. I even made the foolish mistake of reading up on some of their “how I did it” posts on Hacker News and saw all these wonderful frameworks that they had been using, assuming this would make me a master overnight. Stepping through some of the tutorials and looking at the tools available started to raise some eyebrows since they were unlike anything I had seen before, and this is where I got suspicious.
You see I could whip up a simple desktop app or PowerShell script in minutes that would do some function using the tools I have in front of me, but that doesn’t mean you should be using those tools to create your site. Neither does that mean you would be able to whip up the same thing using the same tools in the same amount of time, no matter how skilled you were in other languages. The simple reason for this is that whilst you might be a rockstar in ruby or an expert in PHP your experience is confined to the environment to which you’re most accustomed and should you need to retool and reskill for a new language it’s going to be several months before you’re at your maximum competency again.
Sure good developers are able to adapt much faster than so-so developers but there’s a significant opportunity cost in switching away from your current knowledge comfort zone in order to try and emulate those who you idolize. I came to this realization a couple months back after staring at so many Ruby/Python/SomeDynamicLanguage web sites, wondering at how the heck they got them looking and functioning so well. In truth the platform they were using had little to do with it, these guys had just been in the game for so much longer than me that they knew how to get these things done. With me still in the grok stage of my first really truly web framework I really shouldn’t be comparing myself to them just yet, not at least until I can get my new application functioning the way it should.
It’s so easy to get disillusioned with what you’re doing when you see others progressing so much faster than you ever thought you could. My new application was supposed to be a testament to my coming of age as a web developer, having giving myself only a short time to get it off the ground before actually launching it. Since my deadline for that has come and past I’ve been forced to change the way I view myself as a developer and have come to realize that unless I’m working in something I’ve developed with before I shouldn’t expect myself to be a rockstar from day one, instead recognizing that I’m still learning and pushing through the pain barrier until I become the rockstar I thought I was.
¹If you’re interested, what’s hot right now is photo sharing apps. What’s not? Location apps, go figure.
