Ah, man, kid, try being 43 with a Github profile full of half-finished repos.
You haven't failed. Part of what's pathetic about the tech industry and culture, and why I've mostly bowed out of it, is that it makes you feel like you're a failure at 22. Christ, even rock singers get until they're 30 to feel that way.
You're fine, man. You just need to decide what you really want. If that means being a coder, it's easy - figure out the framework du jour, learn it, get paid to build stuff with it. You'll probably be able to keep up for about another fifteen years before you realize you have no idea what the hell this new thing is that all the 22 year olds are clamoring about that runs entirely contrary to every good habit you've ever learned. (Say, separation of code and presentation - I'm looking at you, JSX. )
But you can do a lot in fifteen years. My advice is to have something else after you age out of tech, though, which you're nowhere near doing yet. Me, I'm a writer and musician, and though neither pay as well as they used to, it's still something to do other than my part time Node coding day job.
You got this, man. Sky's the limit. Just be smart about your choices, because that time moves much faster than you would ever believe. Nobody believes that until it happens to them, but nonetheless, it's true. Make the most of these days.
And for God's sake, don't spend all of your best physical years sitting behind a laptop. There are hot singles in your area, my dude. Go find some. Life is too short and this industry does not love you the way you think it will. Find a person to do that instead.
Tangent, but JSX is a templating language, and templating languages don’t dictate whether your presentation logic is well separated. You can write well-stratified React code or poorly-stratified React code, the difference is whether you choose to separate it that way. For example, see the S convention in styled-components.
Conversely, you can have terrible Django templates that contain all your controller logic.
this was a really good post. youre not going to get the top job at google, but you can make a lot of money by just getting good at one backend language + sql.
Comments
Ah, man, kid, try being 43 with a Github profile full of half-finished repos.
You haven't failed. Part of what's pathetic about the tech industry and culture, and why I've mostly bowed out of it, is that it makes you feel like you're a failure at 22. Christ, even rock singers get until they're 30 to feel that way.
You're fine, man. You just need to decide what you really want. If that means being a coder, it's easy - figure out the framework du jour, learn it, get paid to build stuff with it. You'll probably be able to keep up for about another fifteen years before you realize you have no idea what the hell this new thing is that all the 22 year olds are clamoring about that runs entirely contrary to every good habit you've ever learned. (Say, separation of code and presentation - I'm looking at you, JSX. )
But you can do a lot in fifteen years. My advice is to have something else after you age out of tech, though, which you're nowhere near doing yet. Me, I'm a writer and musician, and though neither pay as well as they used to, it's still something to do other than my part time Node coding day job.
You got this, man. Sky's the limit. Just be smart about your choices, because that time moves much faster than you would ever believe. Nobody believes that until it happens to them, but nonetheless, it's true. Make the most of these days.
And for God's sake, don't spend all of your best physical years sitting behind a laptop. There are hot singles in your area, my dude. Go find some. Life is too short and this industry does not love you the way you think it will. Find a person to do that instead.
Tangent, but JSX is a templating language, and templating languages don’t dictate whether your presentation logic is well separated. You can write well-stratified React code or poorly-stratified React code, the difference is whether you choose to separate it that way. For example, see the S convention in styled-components.
Conversely, you can have terrible Django templates that contain all your controller logic.
this was a really good post. youre not going to get the top job at google, but you can make a lot of money by just getting good at one backend language + sql.
also great advice to get some excercise