It's fun to be competent

This was one of the key takeaways for me from DHH's keynote talk from Rails World 2024.

It's more fun to be competent.

In this section of the talk, which starts around 32:45, he was speaking about his move from the Cloud to on-prem infrastructure and adopting Linux as his main development environment.

That people suffer from "server-phobia" when they could learn these skills from themselves.

As a self-taught Developer, I started to learn coding in 2010 and had to learn everything from scratch - starting with HTML and CSS before introducing PHP.

Since then, I've learned various other related technologies, including Linux, and exclusively run Linux for my computers and servers.

I switched full-time to Neovim in 2021.

For the past couple of years, I've been using NixOS as my primary operating system.

It was another language to learn and a different way to think about server configuration and automation.

But, I recently went to add something to my configuration and knew exactly how I was going to implement it. I was able to do it quickly and easily as I'd invested enough time to be competent and feel confident and that I knew what I was doing.

I've been writing a new Drupal module this week and have been in a constant flow state as I knew how I need to implement it.

I've been doing test-driven development and working through a few different iterations, guided by my tests and ensuring I don't break what I've already written.

These are skills and knowledge that that took time to learn.

Here's the thing

Whether you're a new Developer getting into programming or an experienced Developer learning something new, you will become competent.

And it is more fun.

It just takes time and effort.