[jjice]

I'm far from a great programmer, but working I'm towards it every day. Something I've just realized more and more is that the raw programming ability is really the baseline. It really feels like good design and architecture is where the heart of programming comes from. Maintaining code I wrote two years ago has shown me how bad certain decisions where and how great other were and then I have that knowledge going forward.

As I've worked with more senior engineers who have done this over and over again, I've noticed that the raw programming part isn't any different. I still know all the same things. But they have the most valuable ideas from experience. Their foresight to lean towards a specific implementation because they've seen where this plan falls short in the past ends up being a massive time and money saver.

Dealing with tricky problems has provided the largest growth for me. I worked at a scrappy startup where I wrote a ton of CRUD endpoints and got to do something interesting here and there. You don't learn anything new when you write the same code over and over with some basic stuff in place. I've found that I've learned the most from problems that are intimidating at first.

It's honestly comforting to know I can write similar code to more experienced engineers but I'm lacking their foresight and experience.