The Plunge
I believe that there is a step that every developer must take. For lack of a better term, I will call it the Plunge into Knowledge. I've seen it happening many times, and it happened to me as well. You start your development life by doing your job. You get a task, you do it. If you hit a snag, you turn to one of your co-workers for advice. If they hadn't yet taken the Plunge themselves, they will give you the best answer they have, an answer they probably received from someone else who used to be in the team. Many accept that and move on. They don't try to search for a better answer, even though for all they know, the answer they got is 10 years old and there might be a much better solution. They don't try to improve as they don't feel there is anything to improve. So they keep at it, never going forward, always with their head in the ground.
If you're lucky, you'll either wake up from this illusion yourself, or someone will be there to wake you up. And so you dive into a world of knowledge: books, web-sites and blogs full of information. And you find out there is a huge amount of people out there doing the exact same things you're doing. And some of them have found better ways of doing these things. And you realize that what you've been doing for so long and taken for granted, shouldn't have been done this way at all. You see how blind you were when you weren't learning new methods, new technologies, when you weren't improving.
If you're reading this blog, that means you've taken the Plunge, so feel good about yourself. I know many developers who don't read any blogs at all, that have never read a single software-related book. They're happy in their ignorant little spot, oblivious to the storms raging outside. I used to be like that as well. While I was at college, and up until the end of my first year at work, I was doing my thing, developing ASP.NET 1.1 and feeling good about it. Can you imagine that I never even bothered to read about .NET 2.0 until my team was about to transition to it? That I haven't downloaded any of the early versions of Visual Studio 2005? It seems ludicrous to me now. A new technology, which offers to change a lot of the way I work, was on its way, and I hardly paid it any attention. I finally opened my eyes, thanks to some of my team-mates, and was overwhelmed by the amount of things I don't know. Overwhelmed by all the technologies that were either here for a long time or about to come out soon. It seemed that it would take me years to catch up. But you can't swallow an entire ocean, so you take small sips. On the way, you become a much better developer than you've ever been.
I think that it is your duty to make sure people around you take the Plunge. You'll produce much better software this way, and you'll have more fun as well. When you're constantly learning and trying new things, even difficult times seem a lot brighter.
Have a great holiday, and don't forget to breathe.