Something I believe in deeply is venturing outside your specialisation as much as possible. It's not a new or particularly original idea, but I think it's single-handedly the biggest reason behind almost everything I've achieved.
If you've been reading these for a while, you know me. A frontend developer, crippled by impostor syndrome, who somehow gets by. I try to be better every day, and I don't measure success in money, status or recognition. I just look in the mirror and ask whether I'm a better person than I was yesterday, in any respect.
When I started, I was obsessed with being the best possible at what I did. Building UIs, in my case. It wasn't about career or status. I just wanted to be the best. Looking back, I think that was the first symptom of the impostor syndrome that would shadow most of my career. I wanted to be the best so I'd feel I belonged, with my colleagues, with the wider community, with my family whenever they asked how work was going.
I was chasing something unreachable by definition. Being "the best frontend developer" means nothing, and it means even less in a field that reinvents itself constantly. It's an endless chase with no finish line. You get better, sure, but every target you hit just spawns a more ambitious one behind it.
Unsurprisingly, I started burning out and nearly falling out of love with the job. Coding had always been my passion, but I felt useless and limited, convinced everyone around me knew more than I did. The thing I couldn't see at the time was that they didn't know more. They knew different things. That distinction would have saved me a lot of grief if I'd understood it sooner.
My saving grace was a personality trait that always pulls me toward helping the people around me. If I see a colleague deep in something and I can lighten the load, I don't think twice, even when I have no idea what they're working on. That instinct kept throwing me into territory further and further from my CSS files.
I recognised the pattern fairly early, even if I couldn't articulate it. I didn't see the immediate value in taking on random tasks outside my remit, but I threw myself into them anyway, with focus and curiosity. And I noticed something: I thrived when I was dropped into the deep end and left to work things out.
That slowly became my actual speciality. Working with the unknown, finding a way through, picking up things I'd had no clue about when a project started. I gravitated toward experimental work, more R&D, and along the way I absorbed a bit of everything, backend, hosting, CI/CD, design, product, sales, support.
I never saw the full picture until recently. I arrived at my new job, where the level is genuinely high and the step up considerable, and found myself needing to fill a lot of gaps. But I noticed I was bridging that gap with all those scattered notions I'd picked up without realising. I'd never had a dedicated product manager or designer, but I'd been in those conversations for years. I struggled with the formal processes, but I could often read what was right for the end user better than the average developer. There was a mountain of new infrastructure to learn, but the broad concepts were already there.
Over-specialisation would have made this much harder. Maybe my PRs would have drawn slightly fewer comments, but surviving the day-to-day wouldn't have been realistic. Being more of a generalist is what made adapting possible.
The balance between the two is the key. Be as good as you can in your vertical, but don't be afraid to expand horizontally. Talk to people doing interesting things, understand more of what's happening beyond your little frontend island. That's what makes the leap possible.
This week I picked up my first BI ticket. I'm fairly sure I didn't even know what BI stood for before joining the data team. And now look at me. Setting up Databricks environments, running pipelines, managing clusters. I've rarely felt so lost or so out of place. Everything felt foreign, different from my comfortable setup, genuinely hard.
I loved it.