– originally written on 17 December 2022 at 8:11 am
One time during the sync with Angular devs from the different teams, Fanis, a Google Developer Expert (GDE) was sharing his screen. He had the official Angular repo open and he was explaining a bug he had solved after he had looked into parts of the codebase. I had never seen anyone do that before; open the official codebase and hunt down the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the tool and use that knowledge to explain how they solved a critical bug.
That moment stayed with me.
A little while ago I came across an article that was an in-depth look into a major feature of Angular. The article was very detailed and went into the bare metals of how Angular built the feature, and how it worked under the hood. It is to date the most detailed article I’ve ever read on that subject.
I went searching for more articles from that author and later I landed on his personal website. I was blown away. This dev blew me away. A 2nd-year student of Mathematics and Computer Science with a drive and excellence that I admire in Fanis.
He had written deep dives on some subjects including webpack. He made them interesting, he made them look easy. He broke down the Angular Router, Reactive Forms and many other technologies.
Here are some words from different sections of his website:
My curiosity makes me want to know more about the how and why behind the tools I’m working with.
…
One of my ambitions is to become the best programmer I can humanly be.
…As I’m a curious person, I enjoy watching all sorts of documentaries. Most of them are about history, especially because every time I learn something new about what happened in the past, I’m getting a sense of gratitude. It is quite hard to put into words!
Andrei Gatej
His GitHub contains a repo where he documents all his answers on StackOverflow. He has answered 449 questions – all very quality answers.
It was incredible to see someone with a passion for programming and the proof visible for all to see.
I was and still am motivated by this dev. I remembered a tweet I had read years ago that urged African devs to contribute more to Stackoverflow. I remember going to StackOverflow, but not keeping up – the questions seemed to be from another Universe. After reading Andrei’s articles, and going through his profile, I went back to Stackoverflow.
Every day since then I’ve searched SO for questions I could answer and monitored interesting questions I couldn’t answer. I would wait for someone to answer and learn from it.
Every day since then I’ve answered questions, edited questions, providing solutions through comments and I’ve begun to feel like the first time I wrote QBASIC in 100level. I remember the feeling but I’ve never recaptured it since I left the 100-level QBASIC class. I had a carryover in JavaScript and I thought my life was over.
I have that QBASIC feeling now. I feel light. I look forward to building things now. Fun things, useless things, useful things, colourful things, anything. It’s like a switch has been turned on. I can learn and use any technology I want!
Recently I built a project with Rust and JavaScript. When it was done I felt like I could fly. Coding feels ‘fun’ again without the pressure to close a JIRA ticket.
It’s a different feeling and I found it by accident.
I hope I never lose this feeling again.
#aside
I want to be world-class but I don’t want to be miserable getting there. I want to continue to remember what an opportunity it is to learn, grow and have access to the resources that help me to be better.
It is something to be thankful for.