Photo by Cristian Palmer on Unsplash
The only way noy to drown, is to go deep
Are you just starting out on the wondrous journey of becoming a programmer?
Or are you already a seasoned programmer, and sometimes just feel overwhelmed by all the technologies, the buzzwords?
Maybe you’re reading Hacker News, and you’re gripped by that deep hollow feeling in your stomach because you don’t know Angular, or React, or Kotlin, or Dart, or Go …
Or maybe you’ve just mastered Magento 2 Knockout, just to find out that it is being deprecated.
And there’s that sinking feeling again …
Like you’re drowning in new stuff, like you’re going deeper and deeper in the mud of learning. And instead of getting on top and getting ahead, you’re up to your nose in quixotic frameworks and T.L.A.s (Three Letter Acronyms).
Your ears are filling up with JDK 14, you can’t breath because Flutter is forcing its way into your mouth.
Think of it this way …
Technology enables technology:
Technology enables interconnectedness. Interconnectedness enables growth. Growth enables technology.
(Et cetera, et cetara …)
What’s more, new people come into technology every day. Thus, more people will be creating more technology, faster.
It isn’t going to slow down.
It’s going to speed up.
And with AI looming in the distance …. It might speed up exponentially.
Staying ahead will drag you deep down under
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or a computer scientist, fort that matter) to realize that if you try to stay ahead, to know all there is, you will find the opposite to happen: you will only get dragged further down.
You will drown in everything you don’t know.
You need a different approach.
Secret 1: Discover the constants
If you’ve been in this game for a long time, or even if you just think about it deeply, you’ll discover a couple of things:
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There are trends in programming (and the industry is like a shoal of fish)
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There are timeless basics, that will never go away as long as we´re using some version of the von Neumann machine
For example, when it comes to trends, the pendulum is always swinging between so-called "thin" and "thick" clients, which I’ve written about elsewhere.
You don’t have to agree with what I say in that article, and you can probably come up with use cases that are good candidates for taking the opposite approach, but that’s not what I’m talking about right now. Right now, the point is this: at one time, the majority view is that thin clients are the best (or even the only ones feasible), then thick clients, then thin again.
Be aware of the trends. Don’t be a slave to them. Think for yourself. That way, you will get a deep understanding of the benefits and problems with each approach.
Deep understanding is they key. If you have a deep understanding, you don’t need to memorize facts, and you don’t have to resort to quoting "experts in the field".
Take the time to understand something deeply, it will save you an enormous amount of time and stress in the long run. When you understand deeply, details you would otherwise have to memorize, will simply be logical, understandable consequences of the choices you make.
Go deep.
Secret 2: Niche down
With more people creating more technology every day, at an ever faster pace, you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell’s kitchen of learning everything, and a smaller chance still at becoming an expert.
True, a programmer needs to know a lot of different things, and is in some way a jack of all trades by necessity — she has to know a couple of languages deeply, she needs to be ale to write and optimize sql, she needs to be able to use dozens and dozens of frameworks.
Yet, riddle me this: Who do you think makes the most money: the general practitioner, or the brain surgeon?
And who would you go to if you needed brain surgery?
Even though you need to know quite a lot of "stuff", you should, intentionally and thoughtfully, decide how you want to be known. What’s your speciality? In what field are you going to be the expert?
That doesn’t mean you need to be a world-class expert, not at all.
If means: if somebody in your neck of the woods thought to themselves: "I need a damned good php-programmer", who would everybody else think of first, and recommend to them?
Or even better, go deeper. You could become an integration expert, in .NET. Or someone who specializes in shopping carts, in Java.
That doesn’t mean you don’t know a lot of other languages and markets, and it doesn’t mean you can’t do a lot of other work; it just means that you’re known for something, and that you’re really good exactly there.
The brain surgeon knows a lot about the rest of the body as well, it doesn’t stop her from calling herself a brain surgeon.
Go deep.
Secret 3: Become advanced at the basics
There are many great niches, and I’m not going to tell you which one is the best for you, because, well, I’m not psychic and chances are I don’t know you.
However, there’s a widely overlooked, essential niche you could delve into before anything else:
Your language of choice.
If you’re a Java programmer, and you have been for a while, you’re comfortable with the frameworks and some flavours of SQL, why not get really good at the basics.
This will be a force multiplier. Take some time every week to study the specs.
Go deep.
And the good news …
…is that that’s the road less travelled, and yet it’s a lot smoother sailing than the downtrodden path of incessant follow-up and diving into the latest trends.
Stay aware of the trends. Keep an eye on them. Dive in, if there’s something you find really interesting.
However, don’t smear yourself too thin.
Instead, go deep.