A long time ago, there was a programmer who loved deeply what he was doing. Every day he would open Eclipse with the intention of improving whatever he had programmed the day before. His code lines were poems, the names of his methods were perfect. He did not have JShint installed. He did not need it.
He understood the types of languages that existed and the different purposes that each one pursued very well. He was so good that he did not lack customers, and everyone paid him on time at the end of the month. He was unique.
For a long time, he was very happy with what he had, and did not ask for anything else, since he felt complete and full of life.
One day, he was invited to an event about programming and innovation. AngularJS talks monopolized the tracks and attendees proudly wore their Android and Bower t-shirts.
Sitting in his seat, he watched with joy one of the talks about animations of cubes in CSS3. The speaker’s words were like magic to him, he was quickly fascinated by the use of CSS3 transformations. So much that he wished with all his soul to be an expert in CSS3 transformations, “oh, lord, if only I could be an expert in CSS3 transformations,” he thought to himself.
What this programmer did not know, is that the great Dennis Ritchie (Creator of C) was watching him from the sky, eager to make his dreams come true.
“Expert in CSS3 transformations you shall become,” said Dennis out loud.
And just like that, the humble Java programmer became an expert in front-end development.
The days passed, and the programmer invested his time in creating transformations of geometric primitives with CSS3. A cube, a sphere, a parallelogram, a triangle, the type of figure did not matter, he drew them all, with great mastery and control of the CSS prefixes.
A new event came to his city, JavaScript Fuckers it was called. Happy and with his head high he went to the event, thinking that his mastery of the CSS3 transformations would completely amaze the attendees of the event.
The first talk started, ‘WAT’ was its title. A talk on the ins and outs of JavaScript. He watched carefully as the speaker did not mentioned anything about CSS3, or even used the browser to program. The speaker made continuous references to a new and striking technology, called Nodejs.
“Oh lord!” He thought to himself. “If only I could be an expert on Node.js.”
And so it was. Dennis Ritchie listened again. ”Expert in Node.js you will be, my son.”
Back at his home, the programmer artfully compiled the source code of Node.js. V8 offered no resistance, and even implemented his own V8 debugger in JavaScript, called node-inspector.
He got so many stars in Github, that he was invited to the event of the year, in New York. Its name was Fosdem, and some of the best developers on the planet were attending.
Sitting on his seat, one of the closest to the stage, he listened in detail to all the speakers who were going up there. His head was filled with terms he did not know, Go, Spring, Hadoop, io.js, ionic, all these words were new. He was involved in a sea of ignorance, neither his knowledge about transformations, nor his good knowledge about Node.js helped him to understand what they were talking about in that place, at first a comfortable place but ultimately hostile.
Sad, troubled, lost, he asked again with all his might for a wish.
“Oh lord!” He thought to himself, “If I only could be a wise, enlightened and intelligent programmer.”
And again Dennis granted his wish, “a wise programmer you will become.”
And so it was, as he returned home, he opened Eclipse with the intention of improving what he had programmed the day before. His lines of code were no longer poems, his methods names imperfect, he installed JShint and he started programming about what he was passionate, aware that he still had a lot to learn.
End
This little story tries to demonstrate the impossibility of a man to know everything. We must dedicate time to ourselves, and not to please other people or environments that give us nothing but comfort or discomfort, which doesn’t allow us to evolve as a person.