Today I came a bit earlier to a scheduled session, and while drinking the last sip of coffee, I wondered how many sessions on Codementor I had for the past year and a bit more. I came to my profile just to see that magic number *** 99 *** . What a timing! It’s time for a recapitulation, and sharing some of the lessons I learned being part of this amazing community and doing things that I love doing the most.

If someone told me a year ago that I could have relaxed conversations with strangers on a daily basis, I would think they were joking. I can not say I'm introvert, but speaking with people I just saw for the first time in my life definitely was not one of the favourite things to do. Now, it completely changes. Meeting new people, discussing their projects, commenting weather and holiday plans are the favorite parts of my working days.

I learned a lot.

About me as a person

As a front end developer and designer I’ve been working on a large number of huuuge web architectures as well as on a small single-page apps. I enjoy starting new projects and completing them. For me, that means we completed the cycle: we passed through the project planning, development and launch. The amount of dopamine produced at the start and the end of each project has been pushing me through this world for 10 years. With helping others - it’s the same. Helping people makes me happy. The Secret to Happiness Is Helping Others. I learned it my way.

If someone told me a year ago that I could have relaxed conversations with strangers on a daily basis, I would think they were joking. I can not say I'm introvert, but speaking with people I just saw for the first time in my life definitely was not one of the favourite things to do. Now, it completely changed. Meeting new people, discussing their projects, commenting weather and holiday plans are my favorite parts of day.

About me as a developer

When working on my side projects, sometimes I don’t think too much. Or even enough. I just develop, break, fix. Sometimes even duplicate 😱. But teaching and helping someone makes me much more concise and careful. Not because I am pretending to be more skilled, but because I’m trying to give a good example. And by doing so - it becomes a standard.

I don’t need to learn more to be able to help someone. Thanks to Codementor, I’ve been able to help different developers with different backgrounds, most of whose are way more skilled than me. But together, we can solve problems in a creative and new way. These days, when people ask me what new technology should they learn - I tell them to stop learning. It sounds wrong, but in this oversaturated technology-framework-technique-approach world learning new things is a new procrastination. Finding creative ways to accomplish something with knowledge we already have is much more stable way to progress.

About other developers

Before I actively started helping other developers either here on Codementor, or internally in a small creative development studio I run, I thought only senior developers are the ones who can solve really complex problems. What actually came out is that junior are the ones with amazingly good, new, creative and refreshing solutions we all need nowadays. I often help beginner developers who made it really far with their apps, and who have that much complex questions that I am endlessly happy to have an opportunity to help them (and secretly learn from them 🤫). We should all learn from these newcomers and their ideas.

About other projects

People organize projects differently. Even if they use some ready-made starters, they approach them differently. And it all doesn’t matter. But what I am seeing here is that a big percentage of projects are easy to navigate through and understand its architecture. And that is what matters the most. Outside Codementor, I often work on refactoring huge projects whose architectures are ruined by ninjas and seniors. They maybe write and organize code in a performant way - but more important than that is writing code that other people understand. Project owners and developers start to understand that only when they need external help, and spend much time explaining wheres what, and what each piece of code does.

What's next

To be honest, Codementor was always on the side for me. It was never the main thing I do during the day. Even when I had 4 scheduled session in a day - it was always my hobby. And I am happy to continue like that. Running my own studio provides me with ability to experiment and stay up to date with new trends, so I can provide greater value when helping others overcome their problems. That never-ending fun-teach-learn loop is what I want to do that at least until there’s 1000 sessions number on my profile

Thank you all for this amazing opportunity!