Getting better at what you do

Day 301 / 366

I have always believed that one can never stop learning. It won’t happen after you leave school, or after you graduate from college, or when you get your first job. If you want to keep improving, you’ll have to keep on learning. There are no other shortcuts.

Lately what has been missing in my life is this learning part. With the new company, I have been focusing so much on teaching, team building and just keeping the company from collapsing, that I have not had that much time to learn or improve my skills. You could say that I had gotten overconfident, that I already know all that I have to know and I just need to apply it. But that is objectively false.

Back when I started coding in college, every 2–3 months or so I would learn a new language or a new framework. I had a rule that if I started a new project, I would not just simply copy stuff from my old projects. I would try to use new things and see how they improve the final product. Whenever I learned about a new tech stack, I was always excited to try it myself.

At Blaziken, we try to do this to some extent. But that is more for the benefit of the interns. There isn’t much that we do that is new to me. I want that to change now. I want to make sure that I am spending time filling the gaps in my knowledge, and believe me there are loads of it. I am bad at lots of things, and I want to start becoming good at them now. And the stuff that I am great at, I want to get even better.