A few months ago, I joined a team to work on a new project. This is an ongoing project and the pace of its involvement is really fast. What this means to me is I always feel a bit stressful because there’s always more tasks to do and I just can’t finish them all.

To me, it feels like the biggest difference between a junior and a senior programmer is their mindsets. A junior could easily get stressed if it has a large amount of work to do while a senior would easily call an end of a working day even though there’s endless tasks on them.

This reminds me of the talk given by someone in my graduation ceremony, I think what she said was “Life is not about how we survive through the storm, it’s about how we dance in the rain.”

My professional goal of this year is to develop a resilient mind set where I can enjoy every moment despite a lot of problems on me needed to solve. At work, I think it helps to focus on whether I’ve learnt something new or whether I’ve become a bit better than who I was yesterday, instead of focusing on whether I’ve finished a task or I’ve impressed someone.

Things I’ve learnt this year that will help me develop a resilient mind set, become a better programmer and a happier person.

1. Sometimes, things don’t need to be done in one go. It’s often better to get the process working first and improve it later.

I was developing a feature and got it working locally, but one required asset wasn’t being loaded async. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make it load async, but in hindsight, I could have just submitted it with the synchronous load and addressed the async behaviour in a later change list. That would have given me a sense of progress and helped unblock other teams who were depending on the feature for their development. Kind of like what Web Developete said in his video “Make it work first, polish it later and be able to identify what is working what is polishing”.

2. The real skill is problem solving. Knowledge helps too.

I find that learning debugging tips like how to use data breakpoint in visual studio, how to gather more information like using text log/visual log can help a lot. Knowing how things work and why things are needed help. For example, not only knowing how std::move works but also why it’s needed. The why can help us have a deeper/longer understanding so we can make future decision more wisely.

3. Burnout is real. Protect your energy.

This is from Web Developete as well but I couldn’t agree more, “The best developers are the ones who last. They take breaks. They have boundaries. They rest. They go on holidays. They play games. Think of your brain like a battery. You wouldn’t run your phone at 1% all day. Why do you do that to yourself? You don’t need to hustle every second to prove something. Productivity isn’t about burning out. It’s about sustainability. Sleep, touch grass, go for a walk. Your code will thank you.”