Stop lying to yourself and do something about it
Tags: beginners, webdev, career, 100daysofcode
Published: 2022-08-01 01:27:34

Hello there 👋

My name is Philip, I'm a fullstack developer at a small startup and I've been coding for the past 2 years or so.

Actually, am I a dev? Have I been coding for the past months? 🤔

This post is a **wake up call** to myself and maybe other devs out there that may be in a similar situation as I am (hopefully not).

### Career transition 

To give you context, I'm a postgrad webdev bootcamp, and since I finished the bootcamp I was thrilled to start applying what I've learned to real world cases. In my job at the time they gave me the opportunity to do a career transition, moving from business development to product/web development and I was really happy about it, I was going to be mentored by a very experienced senior dev and learn a lot. 

Everything seemed great 

Then something happened inside the company, we had to move to a different project, but still ok because it was going to be the same structure. Or that's what I thought...

In reality, the senior dev got another job but still wanted to keep on the current job as well, so our code reviews and meetings became less and less frequent, more rushed. I kept saying to myself that if I kept coding I would still be learning tons. But to be honest, I was really lying to myself. Not only this new project/business wasn't appealing, it was more like a side-hustle to the senior dev, so it became really demotivating for me.

### Something new?

I got really frustrated and felt that maybe I need to look for a new job. I got a new job at another startup, I was invited by a tech lead. He offered to mentor me and help in my journey to become a dev as we would transition a whole product from no-code to code, and again I was thrilled.

Some months passed by, and I can count with my hands how many lines of code I've written in this new job and I had to use a no-code tool to help the company with the current app. I was always told that in just a few weeks and you will start coding and surprise surprise, suddenly the tech lead left the company.👺

I got really sick of all this and started applying on jobs. And no surprise to myself, I felt unprepared as I've been months with no-code and not studying. I know this is all my fault, I'm the one that accepted this situation, I just feel really bad that all this time that I could've been studying and preparing for interviews I spent on no-code, not enjoying what I was doing.

### Wake up

Please stop lying to yourself. Don't get comfortable waiting. Go do something about it.
- Build a study plan 
- Commit to a schedule 
- Practice interview problems 
- Build projects
- Read books 
- Schedule interviews

I've had enough, and I'm commited to study really hard and do all the things above to actually become a better developer, a true developer.

Just to give more context on my stack and what I'm going to be focusing my studies:
- Ruby
- Ruby on Rails
- React

This is my first post ever, so thank you so much if read until the end. If anything I said resonated with you, if you enjoyed the post and got curious for next steps, please leave a comment and I will do my best to keep posting about what I'm doing and some progress.

Keep coding, keep learning!