Development of a Developer

Stephen Brennan • 14 March 2017

I was a curious child. I spent hours on the family computer, exploring every menu in Windows 95, and later XP. My exploration sometimes ended badly, like the time when I changed our computer’s language to Portuguese, or the time I set the foreground and background colors of the menus to lime green¹. Exploring and learning about computers has never failed to put that elated, soaring feeling in my chest.

More recently, I’ve discovered how much I like teaching others. Helping somebody else reach that “aha” moment can be even more gratifying than reaching it yourself². As a result of these two loves, I’ve done a lot of learning (you might say, “development” as a developer), and I’ve watched many others as they learn too. Sometimes I feel like we all go through some common stages while growing up as programmers. I recently did some thinking about what those stages might be, and this article is the result. My development is probably not universal, but the retrospective helped me remember what it was like to be a beginner. Hopefully it will help others remember that too.

Step 0: Fascination

As I’ve already said, my fascination with computers was evident early in my life. I spent plenty of hours exploring Microsoft Office, managing my first music library with Windows Media Player, and competing with my brother in pinball and Sonic. It wasn’t long before I became curious about how people actually made those things. Unfortunately, Windows 95 didn’t ship with any tools or documentation for development. It’s funny, because older PCs probably had to include programming tools out of necessity, but I was “lucky” enough to be growing up at the beginning of a “user-friendly” world of computing, where users didn’t have to be bothered with programming.

The biggest barrier to entry at this point was not a lack of information, but rather not knowing where to begin. Internet time was a scarce resource back then. Library books were not likely to contain up-to-date information. Without a parent or friend who knew anything about programming, and without built-in development tools or documentation, I had no way of discovering anything more about programming. Part of me wonders how my life might be different if I had had a computer that shipped with programming tools.

Step 1: Initial Discovery

The summer after middle school, I went to a camp at the University of Michigan called Camp CAEN. There, I had my first ever exposure to “real” programming, in the form of C#! Over the course of around a week, the instructors—mostly college students, bless their hearts—taught us how to use Visual Studio 2005. We learned to use the form designer to drag and drop buttons onto windows. A double click on the button would bring you right to the part of the code that ran when your button was clicked. We learned how to make variables and how to write “if” statements and loops. By the end of the week, I had learned enough to make a silly (but functional enough) version of pong out of Windows Forms.

This phase of development was truly exciting for me. In a few days, I had gone from wondering how people gave computers instructions, to giving them instructions myself. Even simple projects like adding two numbers and displaying the result were exciting, because I could tell the computer what I wanted it to do. For a time, this exciting new world was all I needed to know.

But soon, questions began to form in my head. I felt like I wasn’t getting the whole truth about how programming worked. After all, what was my program doing when the button wasn’t getting pressed? How did the computer put the window onto the screen? What happened when the program first starts? I felt like the truth was being hidden from me, and I didn’t like it.

Step 2: Confusion and Intimidation

These questions quickly lead me into the next step in my development: confusion and intimidation. After camp, I had one simple goal: create a game that kept track of high scores. As I researched a way my program could save data for the next time it ran, I stumbled upon MSDN videos about “SQL Databases”. I followed along with these videos to the best of my knowledge, installing scary programs like “SQL Server Express Edition” onto my computer. Soon I was lost in a sea of big words and complicated interfaces that looked like spreadsheets, but weren’t! What was a schema, and why did I need one just to keep track of high scores?

I never did get my database-driven high scores to work. It was a demoralizing experience, to say the least. Poor 14-year-old Stephen had no idea what databases were or why they existed. He sure didn’t realize that there were much simpler ways to store data (like, a file).

This was the first time I began to feel lost and confused about programming, but it surely wasn’t the last. It happened again the time 15-year-old Stephen tried to understand assembly and two’s complement signed integers. The biggest problem I had was that most of the “help” I found online assumed I knew a whole bunch of other things. Learning how to use a database in C# is hard enough, but it is darn near impossible when you don’t actually know what a database schema is. I really needed someone who could give me high level explanations of what things were.

Step 3: Getting Cocky

In my final years of high school, I became more confident in spite of these setbacks. I did manage to solve some of my early challenges: I learned to use a database, and I even wrote a few tiny assembly programs. I had transitioned to Java and I was even self-teaching myself the AP Computer Science course, since my high school didn’t have one. Somehow my school let me do an independent study, which meant I had an hour per day to mess around on my computer teach myself Java. So things were going pretty well.

I certainly didn’t think I knew everything about computers, but I figured I had pretty much mastered programming. I knew that people studied it in college, so there must have been a few things I hadn’t learned yet. But I just could not imagine what they could be. After all, I knew about classes, functions, arrays, and loops. I could make windows on screens and I had even made a web site.

    I was basically a coding expert.

The biggest thing that prevented me from moving past this stage was that I didn’t have good opportunities for broadening my knowledge. To me, the happy, walled garden of classes, functions, and loops in simple Java programs was everything I needed to know. Meanwhile, I didn’t understand how much was going on behind the scenes—I had no idea about things like garbage collection, memory management, concurrency, networking, etc.

Step 4: Head Above Water

Finally, I started college. The first few years of school were truly eye-opening and humbling. As it turned out, there are more data structures than just arrays, and algorithms can be more complicated than a single for loop. My formal education did a lot to help me mature as a developer, but probably even more significant were the things I continued to learn outside of class.

I started by switching my main computer to Linux. And not just Linux, but Arch Linux, which forced me to learn a lot about the nitty-gritty side of Linux. I finally learned bash well. In those years, I learned my first version control systems (Mercurial, and then Git). I learned C and started writing all sorts of awful code in it. Slowly but surely I began to gain perspective about the complexity of a computer system.

A turning point came thanks to my Networks class. In this course, we walked down the Internet protocol stack, from the application layer down to the link layer. For the first time, I “understood” the pieces of the puzzle that made the Internet work. The machinery made sense. But I also quickly recognized that nobody really understands all of how the Internet works. It’s just way too complicated!

Step 5: Deep Dive

From my late undergrad years, I’m too close to now to say anything with confidence. I don’t believe that there is a well-defined end of Step 4. It’s mostly just a gradual realization of how little you know. For me, at some point a “big picture” started to come together. While I don’t know much of that big picture, I have general ideas about how a lot of these things work together, and I know how I can start to learn about them.

Now, I feel like I’m entering a new stage, which is characterized by delving deep into the parts of the big picture that interest me. In the past year I’ve had the opportunity to learn more about machine learning and data analysis during my time at Yelp, as well as kernel development and networking for my thesis. I’m far from reaching the end of this stage, and I doubt I’ll ever truly “master” any subfield like those.

Takeaways

In these (nearly) nine years of learning, I’m amazed at how much technical knowledge I’ve gained, but even more surprised at how much perspective I have on it already. Below, I’ve distilled a few of the thoughts I have about my learning process, although maybe my thoughts will be wildly different in another nine years.

Nobody Knows Everything

Nobody knows everything about computers. Nobody knows one percent of everything about them. There’s too much to know! The best thing you can do is make a mental map and try to know what things you don’t know.

Respect What You Don’t Know

A simple corollary is that you should always respect the complexity of the things you don’t know well. There is nothing cool about “oh, they just do front-end” or “they’re just a designer”. Chances are, if you’re dismissive about a field, you haven’t learned enough about it, and you’re too ignorant to consider that there even is anything you’ve missed.

Learn to Learn

The most valuable skill you can have is learning. The only constant in my development has been teaching myself new skills. Each time I learn something new, the bar has gotten higher. As the topics get harder, there’s less documentation, fewer books, and more misinformation to sift through. But each time I learn something new, I get better at asking the right questions and looking for answers in the right places.

Embrace Uncertainty

I always thought that the uncertainty, intimidation, and confusion I experienced early on (“Step 2”) would go away with experience. But yet every time I try to learn something new, I experience it all over again. A few weeks ago it was with trying to figure out Docker. For the past few months it’s also been about wrapping my head around kernel development. It seems to me that I will never not feel uncertain and confused when I try something new. And, I’d be willing to bet that I’m not the only one that still feels that way. So instead of letting that uncertainty feed into self-doubt, I’m learning to redirect it into confidence. If I’m feeling lost and confused, that means I’m moving forward.

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Footnotes

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