Stepping out of the comfort zone as a Developer
Tags: career, discuss
Published: 2019-07-13 19:51:33

Over the last couple of years I have experimented a lot of positive changes on my personal life and career that have lead me to try new things, one of them is taking more challenges as a developer.
Since I work remotely, this is important to me, because I don't want to feel like I am stuck in my career. I didn't get to meet many developers working like this, so I was feeling like I was missing the experience of exchanging knowledge and enriching from other colleagues.
I have create a list of things that are helping me to get out of my comfort zone and take more challenges and I ant to share it here:

<ul>
<li>I have started to attend conferences and meetups in my city: this has become a major thing for me, allowing me to meet wonderful people and socializing more. Also, I now have the opportunity to reach out for advice if I need it, not only technical, but careerwise too.</li>
<li>I have started doing code challenge: when I have time to spare, I try to do practical code challenge that help me to level up my skills, sometimes I thought that I didn't knew how to do something so I did not tried, now I challenge myself whenever I can. This has really improve my coding skills recently.</li>
<li>I'm following other developers on social media: I use to think that social media was just for passing time, now I have started using it more as a resource of knowledge and information, also I have found awesome developers that are regular people, and have help me to realize that we all struggle sometimes with our code and our abilities and that is fine.</li>
<li>I have started to own my experience: I use to be self conscious or afraid to say that I was a good developer, I don't think I actually believed that, so I was very very modest about it, now I'm trying to be more confident. I am now able to say without hesitation what I feel comfortable coding and what I am good at, the key is to understand that you don't need to know everything 100%.</li>
<li>I'm participating in projects that I usually don't work with: for example, work with another framework, work in another language that you know but you don't normally use at work, help friends with personal projects, mentor someone, give advice to another developer or ask for advice.</li>
<li>I am taking time for other things: finally, I have started to look for another hobbie, I really like to code but I also believe that it gets stressful sometimes, so I have understand that it is ok to also like other things that does not have anything to do with coding and enjoy them, enjoy my free time not thinking about code is relaxing.</li>
</ul>

I really want to try teaching but is not on my list because I haven't implemented that one yet, this is a work in process.

What else can I try to get out of my comfort zone? 





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