Sep 20 2023
Late night post
Well, not exactly a late night since it's 4:03am, but I'm still awake, so it counts from my perspective. I've been spending a lot of time on discord helping new programmers with their projects and code. It's been fun, challenging, and rewarding. I learn a lot when helping other people. They encounter problems I've never seen before, and I have to figure out how to solve them. Part of being a Senior Developer is not so much knowing everything but knowing how to find the answers to nearly anything. You need to be resourceful and know how to ask the proper questions. I have found that a lot of the issues people have are just describing the problem itself. Once I understand what they're trying to say, I try to translate it into something I believe is a better description of the problem. There are a lot of times I do know the answer off the top of my head, but many times it requires research.
Teaching others is a rewarding experience. I am still very much a student myself, and I will always be. I love learning new things. I have read quotes from famous intelligent people (though I can't remember who said it) that say something like the last stage of mastery is teaching others. I believe that to be true. The weaknesses in my knowledge are made very apparent when I have to explain a concept in simple terms to someone else. I have to truly understand something in order to break it down, simplify it, and sometimes translate it into an analogy. Wasn't it Einstein that said something like that? If you can't explain it to a five-year-old, you don't understand it yourself. I'm paraphrasing, but I think that's the gist of it.
So yea, the point of this post is to remind myself that helping others not only helps them, but it helps me. I learn a lot from helping others.