TL;DR

As software developers, we must have flexible minds to learn whatever we need to solve the problems we face. It’s awesome to be specialized. However, it’s better to go beyond and learn anything else we can to improve our specialty.

Disclaimer

This is only my personal opinion, based on my life experience and the folks I’ve met. It’s okay if you don’t agree; in that case, I invite you to comment with your thoughts. I’d love reading them.

Introduction

Over the last 6 years of my life, I’ve been interacting with a multitude of software developers. Backend, Frontend, DevOps, FullStack, etc. Even though everyone has a specialty, at the end of the day, we are all just solving problems.

Why do I say this?

It's simple: every day, we solve some problem. It doesn’t matter if it is a bug, a text, or an endpoint; you get the point, right? This means, for me, that we cannot have square minds and limit ourselves to do a single thing. After all, we all have different points of view on how to solve the same problem.

At the beginning of my professional career, I started as a FullStack developer. I worked with Laravel and ReactJS. It was an awesome job; I could learn a lot there as a junior developer.

It was a small company, so many things or roles had to be done by the same person across the team. Of course, it was exhausting, but I was thinking of the knowledge I was getting instead of the money I had as income.

Time for specialization

The beauty and sweet specialization. After I quit that job, I focused on learning and improved my weakness: frontend development. I really sucked at JavaScript. Thus, I focused on improving it.

I had landed my next job as a frontend developer specializing in React. The journey was not easy for different personal reasons. However, I got the job.

One month later, I realized how much I had to learn about UX and UI to expand my knowledge and develop very accurate interfaces. Again, it wasn’t an easy task, but I put in all the effort I could to deliver the best quality.

Time for self-realization

After a decent time, I moved to a new company. I was hired again as a frontend developer using ReactJS (long-live React 😂). Even though I had landed as a specialized developer in React, I faced many challenges that I never said no to (I like challenges a lot).

I had to manipulate server instances in the cloud. Setting up Docker containers for a FTP server. I had to work on the backend side, developing the API for the frontend app I was helping to build.

This made me realize how much I love software development, not just the fact that I work on the backend or frontend, but solving problems. Also, I learned I couldn’t be married to a single technology.

I had to transform my mind to be abstract to the technology. Nowadays, I don’t mind which language, tool, framework, or library I have to learn to solve the problem. As long as it solves the problem.

Conclusion

It’s been a fun journey so far. I don’t know what the future holds for me professionally. However, I hope I can keep my mind sharp and flexible enough to continue my learning path. I will continue working with React. However, my mind is open to any challenge I can face; after all, I’m just a problem solver.

Cover Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash