Driven: How to Bounce Back from Failure and Improve as a Developer

When I decided to pursue a new career that would advance my expertise in the software engineering realm, I was lucky to land an interview at Facebook. Unfortunately, because we all have our bad moments, I messed up one of the coding challenges that was presented to me.

Did I look at this as failure? Well, yes, but failure is what drives us to be better. For the next six months, I dug into multiple paths and ways to be better. Not to land a job at Facebook, but to push my baseline higher for the skills that I needed. That interview let me know what I needed to work on and what I was already good at.

From there, I started to develop my baseline skills more — the ones that become rusty when you don't use them after college. I made myself more aware of software needs. This also helped me realize that I wasn't allowing myself to learn anything new at my previous job. I decided to take a leap into a different realm and put myself outside of my comfort zone.

Since working at my current position, I have already expanded my skill set beyond the basics of what I already knew. Sure, I built out solutions in AWS, but it wasn't until I got here that I begin to dive into Lambdas, Docker in Elastic Beanstalk, and learning the whole CI/CD DevOps strategy.

Expanding my skill set has also opened me up to the open source community. I feel that supporting the open source community allows companies to reduce costs through built solutions that are pioneered by some of the best companies, or individual engineers.

In a nutshell, what drives me most is providing solutions to clients that will better evolve their every day lives. Not to reduce or remove, but to produce solutions to help clients be better at what they do in hopes that they will have the same drive and values that I have.

I hope this motivates you drive yourself to the limits and explore how great you can be.