“How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner“

A reminder we should always be learning and questioning the status quo. I was an Expert Beginner at coding, Object Oriented Programming, and in Testing. I thought I was “done“. Thankfully 16 years later, I hated it again.

The coding part terrified me; I stopped hating my code after 5 years. I didn’t know where to go. At the time, I had seen some posts of older devs questioning career progression. I knew management wasn’t for me (the guy who built FeedDeamon was the first life-long Individual Contributor I knew). I never saw architects code, but _did_ want more control. OOP, I just gave up after Functional Programming paid a lot of dividends in a shorter period of time, there was way less “confusion” on “how to do it”, and a lot less thought leader blogs & books.

Testing, took YEARS to get better, though. The graph he shows, same happened to me in Powerlifting, Bodybuilding, Parkour, DM’ing in Dungeons & Dragons, Running, Backpacking, and even Functional Programming. But testing? At LEAST 10+ years of many false starts, failures, and confusion why I hated it but smart people claimed it was “the way”.

He’s got 3 articles related to this, I’ve only read this one first.