I've been thinking a lot about growth lately. My own, specifically.
Changing jobs, living through a period of genuine uncertainty for developers, and having the kind of personality that defaults to self-analysis, I find myself doing this more than ever. Mapping the gaps, naming the weak spots, trying to understand what I've built and what I've just been carrying around out of habit. Maybe I do it too much. But the alternative, not looking at all, seems worse.
What this moment has made clearer is how much I've been thriving in some areas and merely surviving in others. Some of that is laziness, some of it is the comfort zone doing what comfort zones do. Either way, the gaps are real.
The new environment surfaced them faster than I expected. A higher average level around me, a much larger company, and a culture that is consciously oriented toward the future, with AI at the centre of almost every conversation. None of this made me afraid of becoming irrelevant. What it did was confront me with the size of the gap I had to close. That's a different kind of uncomfortable, and it prompted some honest thinking.
The technical side, strangely, has been the most straightforward. I've always pushed beyond what I already know. Exploring the unknown, assessing what's possible, filling gaps as I find them, that's where I naturally operate. What I found here was that my frontend knowledge needed some polishing, and my backend knowledge was spotty at best. Python, Mongo, how to think about building efficient systems rather than just features. Areas to develop, not crises to manage.
Most of the progress I've made on this front came through mentorship. Being around experienced developers and watching how they think has been more valuable than anything I could have read or studied on my own. The code itself I picked up fairly quickly. What surprised me was everything around the code: the patience in planning, the habit of looking at the whole system before touching any part of it, the discipline of not just diving in. Simple things, in theory. But they've changed how I approach almost everything.
The harder work has been on the personal side.
I'm naturally quiet and introverted. I overthink, I dislike the idea of bothering people, and arriving somewhere new with hundreds of unfamiliar faces is not something I find easy or energising. I tend to be a slow starter. When people know me well, the connection is real and solid, but early on my demeanour can read as low energy, or disinterest, or shyness. That's not who I am, but it's often how I land.
So I've been making a conscious effort. Not to become someone else, but to show up more deliberately in the moments that matter. Every meeting, every interaction, every small opportunity to connect. The company makes it easier than most, being remote-first, everyone navigating similar dynamics, with plenty of cross-team work and social occasions built in. None of it comes naturally to me. But I decided that not trying would just be a waste of a good situation.
I won't pretend the process is anywhere near finished. If anything, I see the gaps more clearly now than I did before. But that clarity feels like progress in itself. Knowing what to work on, and actually choosing to work on it, is not a small thing. Not even trying would have been the real failure.