Am I A Better Developer Today Than I Was Yesterday?

That is the question I ask myself everyday. It is something the coach at Makers Academy asks us if we are feeling a bit down during our trek to become junior developers. I have found that asking myself that question everyday also keeps me honest about the effort I am putting in the course.

Sometimes, at the end of the day, it is hard to answer this question. It is easy to focus on the details of what I’ve done, which can make the negative things that happen seem stronger. For example, I recently spent most of the day with my pair partner stuck in pages and pages of documentation on the Rails framework and related APIs. Eventually we manage to get our feature to work and the tests to pass. But then I think “What did I actually learn today? I spent so much of it reading documentation and trying things in a REPL?”

The answer wasn’t that my brain has absorbed some new bit of code to implement a feature into our Rails app. It was that I learned, and applied, how to develop when you are at the limit of your knowledge. It doesn’t take long to get there as someone who has only been coding for 3 months! But I’ve found it is getting easier and easier to a) define what it is I want the program to do, b) research a solution, c) understand the solution and apply it to the my code.

When I think of some of the things I’ve accomplished over the past 8 weeks, I really feel proud and excited with the direction I’m going. What are some of these accomplishments you ask? Oh let me tell you!

· Written many little Ruby and JavaScript apps using TDD and Object Oriented Design

· Integrated the Twilio API into one of the command line ruby apps

· Created several web applications using Sinatra and Ruby on Rails frameworks

· Written a front end, single page app using only pure JavaScript (including writing a custom JavaScript testing framework)

And that is just the short list. I didn’t mention anything about all the work I’ve done with databases or the many different Ruby Gems and APIs that have been integrated into the projects.

So, right now, I ask myself, Am I a better developer than I was yesterday? The answer is, without a doubt, YES!

Thanks for reading this ramble.