For my whole career I've grown organically, without any specific direction or shape. I just tried to do my best each day, spot where I could improve, and act on it.
It worked. But now I'm starting to hit a ceiling.
I'm a developer with real skills, yet I sometimes struggle to get the most out of them. Every day I wake up, check the tickets I need to work on, tend to communication and relationships with my team, and repeat. For a long time, that was enough to slowly grow into the developer I am now.
Problems would come up, most days if not all, and I'd figure them out as best I could. The growth happened there, in the moment. It wasn't an afterthought exactly, but it had no direction, no goals, nothing measurable behind it.
I've reached a stage where that isn't enough anymore. Not to sustain the level I'm at, not to keep pace with a demanding, fast-moving market. And it's a waste of resources. Being surrounded by top-tier professionals and not optimising my own growth would be a genuine shame.
So I started with a simple exercise: could I picture myself in ten years, five years, one year? That gives a trajectory, a broad sense of what I want to become and how things might look. It doesn't need to be set in stone. But it forces you to look in the mirror and dig honestly into what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, which of those weaknesses are just excuses, and which are real limitations to account for.
For me, that meant reflecting on all the years I spent learning alone, without a mentor or senior figure beside me. It made my knowledge solid but uneven, full of small holes. It also left me questioning what I know far more than is healthy. So I had to self-evaluate ruthlessly to establish a realistic starting point, and in doing so I realised that filling those gaps would actually be motivating rather than daunting.
The next step was narrowing the focus to the coming twelve months. The longer horizons can stay loose, a rough trajectory. But the next year needs structure, otherwise you're not planning at all, you're just writing a wishlist. So I identified the areas I need to focus on to move toward where I want to be, and started breaking down what would actually make them possible.
Having that more granular view made everything feel more real, more achievable. It stopped being daydreaming and became the start of a journey I felt genuinely prepared for.
But a list of subtasks isn't a plan either. Without something more, it's just a glorified to-do list, a backlog of generic items that may or may not ever get touched. So I attached targets to each area. Something trackable, measurable, something I can work toward and be evaluated against, and something I can look back on later as a record of progress.
At that point the picture became much clearer. I do want to become a better developer, but now it's not a vague proposition. It's a detailed plan that spells out exactly what "better developer" means for me.
With that in hand, I can see which people can help me most. I can set up one-to-ones, ask for specific tickets, or shadow areas I'm less familiar with. That's the real value of working somewhere with high standards, where everyone can become an asset in someone else's growth.
None of this came naturally. I'm ambitious, but I've never liked exposing that ambition, it makes me feel cocky, arrogant even. I was raised not to expect too much from others and to just work my way up quietly. Putting my ambitions into an explicit plan is a stretch for me. But it's a challenge I'm willing to take, even with the discomfort running high.
I feel like I've taken the first step. Now it's all on me.