When I was a noob

Hymn to criticism and continuous improvement

This post is a translation from a very old post of mine but still relevant some years later. In the same time, it’s a reminder for myself.

What did I do when I was a noob ?

• When I was a noob, I used to compare programming languages and trolled about this or that not even knowing a thing about what I was saying,
• When I was a noob, I used to believe that the quality of a project depends on the choice of the programming language to use,
• When I was a noob, I thought I could make a better Facebook or Google just because I wrote a mysql query and got those results on a webpage,
• There were two steps when I was a noob : the first one when I considered myself the best developer in the world just because I’ve installed WordPress and made some tweaks to the default theme, the second step was when I considered using a CMS was an admission of weakness,
• When I was a noob, I used to think that using a framework or a library was bad, “How can you consider yourself a developer if you don’t write everything from scratch”,
• When I was a noob, I used to think that functional programming, object-oriented programming etc… are just some weird concepts you learn in your software engineering class, useless !!!
• When I was a noob, I used to write SQL in the middle of PHP with some taste of HTML and some lines of javascript, all in the same file. SoC you said ? Get back to earth please 😯,
• When I was a noob : “design patterns what ? you’re kidding right”,
• When I was a noob, I used to not write unit tests, e2e tests either. “Why the hell do I need those things ? my code is just perfect! waste of time.”,
• When I was a noob, I used to do all the testing manually and why do we need to test in dev environment, testing in prod is better, no time wasted,
• When I was a noob, nothing was automated, neither deployment or testing, nada. I might have been a masochist to love repeating myself over and over again,
• When I was a noob… Continuous delivery ? Continuous integration … euuh… What ? Who ? How ?
• When I was a noob, I was not using Git or even SVN. Useless, just work on my computer and send everything over FTP,
• When I was a noob, I used to think Javascript is only good for adding some effects or animations to my web page,
• When I was a noob, I used to write code alone. Sharing, community … I didn’t give a sh**. Be serious please, don’t forget I was the greatest developer of all time 😎,
• When I was a noob, I wrote a post that told what I did when I was a noob, believing that I was no longer a noob.

And you ? What did you do when you was a noob ?