For the vast majority of my professional career, I’ve been working with mostly just PHP, and felt pretty confident with it. However, the longer I worked with just PHP, the more afraid I became of branching out into new things. I watched as the backend ecosystem started changing – it seemed like every one was picking up Node or Go or Ruby – but what if I couldn’t learn those? What if my skills didn’t transfer? What if I wasn’t as good as I am at PHP – or even worse, good enough to even get anything done?
Last fall, my team was tasked with building a new service, and a coworker suggested it was a great opportunity to create a serverless microservice using Node JS. Over the course of a few months I had to throw myself into learning the AWS ecosystem, functional programming, learn Serverless, start writing JS – and I realized I’d been holding myself back for no reason.
That project started me down a path of learning TONS of new technologies – and after 20 years of writing software, I finally got over my reluctance to learn how any of the hardware side worked – which was based in the same fear of not being good enough. I bought a kit and started learning about microcontrollers and circuits. Powering an LED for the first time and controlling which LED light up with a simple toggle switch was as rewarding as those first “Hello World” scripts. I jumped into python and C++, built IoT devices for my home by sending signals over WiFi and long range radio, learned how to solder – and then taught my 8 year old daughter how to!
I asked my daughter to come up with an idea for a project for us to build together, and with her (admittedly vague) product requirements, we started working on her “cube shaped light controlled by drawing on an iPad app”. I created a React app for the frontend, which not only needed to support touch events so it would work on the iPad, but even multi-touch for better interactions. The backend is functional JS running on a lambda, which communicates with a third-party service to push events to the microcontroller – which is running python to control a bunch of individually addressable LEDs. The final step was designing a case for the whole thing, which went through a bunch of iterations where we tried to use acrylic cut on the CNC machine, before I finally caved and bought a 3D printer.
If you had told me a year ago that by this time next year, I’d be comfortable with any ONE of these ideas: writing python, react – or any JavaScript – working in AWS, building physical circuits from scratch, designing 3D models – I’d have laughed and said you had the wrong person.
I wish I hadn’t held myself back for so long. Don’t be afraid to step outside of your comfort zone, the discomfort is where we grow. There is an entire world of communities just like our PHP community, out there waiting for more newbies.
