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Tell HN: Confessions of a Prideful Junior Programmer

6 points by kbrannigan ↗ HN
I don't have 25 years of experience in the industry. So I don't have a lot of advice to give but I can share something with the community.

Here are biggest delusions I overcame, throughout my 7 year career.

1. Shared Hosting(Cpanel) is not beneath me.

Seduced by Hype Driven development, I wanted to pad my resume by learning the latest technologies. Why would I host my site on shared hosting? No real programmer would use phpmyadmin, my project would have 1M users on day one, I needed a bare metal VPS. The irony is that I ended up recreating a buggy, half baked version of CPanel.

2. PHP is beneath me.

I was ashamed to tell people I use php. On reddit, youtube and HN real programmers used Haskell and React. Everything should be a bloated javascript SPA, with an overly complex toolchain. Since the average joe without formal training could figure out how to FTP files and have a site running, I needed to be different. I was too good for PHP.

3. Wordpress is beneath me.

I was afraid that people would "view source" on my project, see that it's built with Wordpress. I thought they would silently judge me. I wasted months upon months, re-inventing the wheel, I could have delivered a working product in a matter of weeks.

All this to say.

I might never build a product that reaches 100k active users. My product might never make it on top of Hacker News, It might never get featured on TechCrunch and it's okay.

I don't have to be the best programmer in the world. It's okay to build little programs and apps for small businesses, with a simple database and a simple front-end.

I might never work for a MicroMetaGooAppleZon, it's okay too. I might never break into high 6 figures and it's okay too.

This was the best realization I made.

Life is good once I figured that out.

Thanks for reading.

6 comments

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nesoi-mapp
The important part is what you learned while re-inventing the wheels. Yes you created a buggy mess, but it's your buggy mess and you understand the original more for having created it.
kbrannigan
Good point. That's a good perspective.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
Dracophoenix
What was it you were trying to make? Some sort of CRM but in a "master hacker's" language? If so, it reminds me of the this old joke: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/714qdq/web...
kbrannigan
Right! Funny when I realized that a lot of the issues in the industry are Self inflicted.

Tools built to stroke the programmers own ego.

Dracophoenix
Building a half-baked Cpanel clone isn't a bad way to start and fail. Everyone had to start somewhere, even the guys who built Wordpress, Cpanel, Drupal, etc.

Ego wasn't really the problem in your case. It's good to have an ego so long as it's not divorced from reality.

I don't mean to lecture, but it seems like your issue was trying to find a problem in need of a solution and under the belief that's how people make money.

For starters, what did you want your project to do, that all the others couldn't? How did you expect it to differentiate itself in terms of speed, interoperability, new features, or any other variables. What, in real terms rather than aspirational ones, made it better?