I recently went through my Github repo to label my school projects in the event of encountering recruiters mid-scouting.

Reading through my code trying to decipher which project belonged to what class,

I cringed.

I recognized projects where I experienced immense growing pains.

I remembered the feeling of frustration fueled by the toxic cocktail of my naiveté, the excuse of a short and strict timeline, depression and perfectionism.

Perfectionism is problematic.

I have always had the nasty habit of comparison.

Related to it, I have the wonderful talent of encountering developer-designers at their peak or rising to it.

They were the epitome of career perfection.

Thus, the act of comparing myself to these shining examples of the ideal developer/designer has kept me down, and I am the only one to blame.

The act of comparison is a complete waste of time.

Spending time comparing yourself to someone else produces absolutely nothing. That could've been spent learning and growing and becoming one of the so-called elite.

The "elite" made mistakes.

The "elite" started from not knowing anything at all, too.

Even those who are influential began with spaghetti code and off-center layouts.

I have accepted the fact I will never be perfect.

I will stumble and fall through coding and designing experiences.
I will continuously blunder through building a product.

But the truth is, that's part of the process, even post-graduation/bootcamp, even while you're well into your career.

You know the age-old techie mantra:

Move fast and break things

Drop the "move fast" part.

Rather,

Break things and learn from it.

Understand concepts and methods through and through so that you spend less time on research, or at least learn the right keywords to find it again, but faster.

For instance, I keep forgetting the short-hand format for CSS font-styling:

font: font-style font-variant font-weight font-size/line-height font-family;

I just had to look that one up for this post. Now I will forget it less and less.

The point is:

if you're not breaking things, you're neither learning nor improving.

To be perfect is to be without flaws, right? You don't have to fix a damn thing about something that's perfect.

Let's be real: "perfection" becomes stale.

Throw the idea of "perfectionism" out the window.

Instead, strive for improvement. Strive to be a better you, a better developer, a better designer than yesterday.

I'm leaving my less-than-perfect school projects in my repo so that I can look back and see how much I've improved since.

• P.S. I highly recommend watching "The Good Place".