Developer patterns in communities
Tags: developers
Published: 2020-08-09 02:24:36

In my time in online communities, not only as developer i have seen certain patterns in a lot of different persons, and certain steps in their own learning route that can make them go from someone with almost no knowledge in the career to senior or even drop out.

I have joined many communities, and i am active in others (mostly telegram) and have made some understanding of a lot of mistakes that are done daily by developers, in their career, in their approach to solving problems or in understanding some complexity.

We observe messages  in the groups and try to answer the questions and aid anyone in its path, but depending on th focus of the person and the question we can reach certain conclusions and answers, from the classic rude one telling them to go and google the question and pick the first answer or make a detailed explanation in some platform. And this is where the first mistake goes, which is learning to seek for help.

**Seeking for help**
A lot of people ask for simple things like how to learn react, or how to center an image in css, we ask them to google, or reply with ambiguous answers like "read the docs", i believe that something very important for a developer is learn to filter information, and ask for the right things, while centering an image in css is a simple question with many simple answers, more ambiguous questions can lead to misunderstanding, and explaining the issue will leadto a more clear solution, but also, learning to google, find some good sources of info andknowing where to look can also help. You can always look for your colleagues preferred sources.

**Copy Pasters**
Following the flow of the answer is not at all viable, A lot of us have fallen into taking the first piece of code from a stack overflow answer, but a newbie mistake is copy pasting without looking for how does the code works, or even making implicit code which makes a tough understanding and debugging in the future. Remember that by not taking into account the variables in implied into some foreign code, making implicit code and hard to understand or not commenting chunks of code blocks the capability for learning, progression and reusability.

**Course Addiction**
While this may or not be caused by imposter syndrome, the best you can try is making a project as soon as you learn a new technology, having courses mount on top of others only distract yourself from improving in certain area, but also getting some route of course can bring you the right knowledge and methodology about some technology.

**Jumping Between Topics**
Try learning one or two things at day to have that neurons on check, but learning different things in a short period of time can mislead your flow or ideas but also make you forget past things, this also comes with a little more backstory of specialist vs fast learners but remember to focus on learning enough in one thing to solve most problems you can encounter before passing to the next thing.

**Knowing When to Rest**
Pressing yourself, Not knowing when to take a rest, is important, taking a few minutes apart or leaving some problem aside because the solution is not that obvious can help you improve as developer, but also taking a walk, a deep breath, and sleeping sooner can help you feel more refreshed, sometimes you want to take things fast and run on your projects, but, take a  time to meditate the things before. With that we go to another point 

**Premeditate**
Before making your next move or copy pasting that line of code, think  about the issues and the behavior that results of said code, sometimes a new feature can lead into sm other failures, that is why you have to take problems at minimum, solve them, and try out the solution

Other issues like not having a roadmap or focus in your career can confuse your path and leave you hanging without a proper knowledge in some matter or area of development, or even techonology, always have a plan, and a backup plan

**And more important...**
Remember that, you may be into this for the money, or for the things you can do with these confusing lines of code, but, remember that programming is just a tool, and going all out in some career that you do not like or understand at all can feel... dull, empty, take heart in to what you do, you are not just a keyboard monkey, but a creator, a problem solver, a developer, and other things that you can do, think in the big picture. 

If you feel like you are one of these, atleast you should know what to take as next step, also, comment your ideas, opinions below ^^