Fighting “Perfect”
One of the hidden side-effects of expertise is never really being satisfied with your work.
I think about this a lot. Coming from animation, we’re taught that every pixel counts and every frame is a painting. There’s really no detail too small to obsess over. As someone told me early in my career — You never know which frame a reviewer might pause your video on.
That kind of obsession with detail is a double edged sword. On the one hand, it unquestionably makes your work better to care. But at the same time, it can really rob you of the feeling of accomplishment for a job well done.
When I would play back a finished animation, all I could ever see were missed opportunities and minor details that I wished I’d had time to iron out. It was such an issue that I had a running policy of not watching old content for 2–3 years after I finished it. It took that long to find the emotional distance to see my own work clearly.
But the truth is, I was great at it.
Jumping from being a master to a novice is a tough tightrope to walk emotionally. Having produced award winning content for massive clients, it’s really hard to reset expectations for myself as a junior software engineer. When I hold my bootcamp projects up to the work I did before, I can’t help but see the gap.
It’s especially tricky to talk about my work with other people. I want to be confident and show how much I know and how far I’ve come, while still recognizing how much further I have to climb.
Yesterday I launched my portfolio site — StuFleisher.com.
Is it perfect? Not hardly. There are 100 things I want to change about the way its put together, and I still have a ton of content to add — but at the end of the day, perfect is the enemy of good.
Building the site was equal parts rewarding and harrowing. Harrowing because I couldn’t tear myself away from it, and I completely forgot to take breaks for several days. Rewarding because I learned so much about CSS, responsive design, and deploying a live site.
I decided to get my hands dirty with raw CSS rather than relying on frameworks. I tried to focus on good structure, building lots of reusable utility classes and semantic naming. I finally got my hands on Figma. I practiced with flexbox and media queries to build responsively, built my first pseudo elements with :after to create a cool stacked window effect, and learned a ton about stacking contexts (and how to thoroughly break a mobile site with blend-modes). I registered my domain, set up my DNS records, and deployed my app (along with several demos) using Netlify and surge.
For now, that’s the focus. Growth over achievement. Every project I build makes me a better engineer. I keep reminding myself not to measure these first steps against my expertise in my last line of work. As one of my bootcamp instructors pointed out, “You don’t need a beautiful product to show good engineering.”
Engineering is too massive to know everything. There will always be missed opportunities. There will always be knowledge gaps. I will always be learning.
There’s no such thing as perfect — now I just need to convince my stubborn brain!