[jmcdonald-ut]

As a student almost done with school something that I've noticed or watched is that a lot of CS students tend to get egos at a certain point about their work, myself included. I recall from my experience that I did group work with a good friend and pushed a lot of my ideas without really listening to all of his--because I was so confident in my ideas. After self inflection I realized that my doing this led to two problems: First it is just downright rude, and the second is that I limited my learning experience by not hearing other ideas and learning how to merge ideas to create a superior one. Even funnier is that in retrospect some of my ideas were downright stupid or would have been difficult to maintain.

My main takeaway from the experience was that every time my ego starts to inflate I should take a step back and breathe. I'm not some God coder, I have three years of experience. I realize that this doesn't quite parallel what the author was talking about, but I felt like sharing it because it was a hard lesson for me to learn.

Also, as an aside, my step dad has been developing for 25+ years. He's a really quiet guy, but when he gets talking I realize just how brilliant he is at this stuff. To those already in the field with careers just blossoming, watch out for those who are quietly smart, if he's anything like other developers sometimes they just don't feel the need to prove themselves to you.