When perfectionism has a deadline
Through my time as a student at the Flatiron School, I have learned what it means to become a developer. Some of the biggest lessons that my education has taught me have extended beyond the scope of what the curriculum was designed to teach. Lessons like taking one error message at a time, keeping code simple, and more recently I’ve learned the importance of project expectations and project production. These lessons became more apparent to me as I advanced in my learning but also in my personal development as a developer. The penultimate lesson, however, was learning to lower my expectations for the sake of production.
Flatiron School is known for having a modern take on education. Teaching students brand new technologies is best brought to the students through the incorporation of the mindsets of students within the lectures. Throughout the lectures, you will read pop-culture references as well as little jokes about what it is like to be a developer. Frequently, throughout the lectures, I came across a running joke that I felt really embodied what it mean to be a developer. The joke was “As developers, we are inherently lazy.” and as I came across it I couldn't help but think to myself how true that was, but only until recently did I realize that the joke is only a half-truth.
As developers, we are inherently lazy, but we are also imaginative, inquisitive, and perfectionists. We are lazy when it comes to having to explain ourselves in the comments of our code, or lazy when it comes to wanting to rewrite the same lines of code over and over again, but we are almost completely the opposite when it comes to our drive to learn and create something new. This mesh of philosophies is really what makes us different from other kinds of product creators because we have a profound want for more while also demanding from ourselves to be abstract.
Unfortunately, our uniqueness also can lead us to issues in our professional lives. This is something I only recently came to truly understand in my journey to becoming a developer. As I learned more and more about what it takes to become a developer, I also had to learn about what sacrifices we have to make as developers. That lesson being downsizing your original plans for your work for the sake of production. As developers, we want to be lazy, but we are also driven by pride to make something spectacular that won’t just be another project we slide into our portfolio and never use again.
As I became a stronger, more confident coder, my aspirations for my projects started to rise well above what was being asked of me to produce. Although this desire to overachieve is part of what makes a developer different from other creators, I also had to learn to tamper with my own expectations because of production deadlines. A bitter lesson that I feel every developer across the world knows far too well. The desire to make something great while at the same time working under a time constraint as well as other unforeseen issues that come with that desire to do more. With this lesson as a developer, you have to let go of your perfectionism and your pride because making something that works in a timely fashion is far more important, than having ideas to make something with nothing functional to show for it when time runs out. All is never lost though, we may have to hinder our expectations for the sake of production, but we never have to give up on our projects after submission. Who is to say you can't come back to that same project well beyond its submission with a new perspective and a new goal to make for its next updated version.