Want to be a Front End Dev?
I recently attended a student exhibition at a school I graduated from almost a decade ago. A freshman was introduced to me by my former mentor and he told me about her desire to be a web developer. I saw this was a chance opportunity to enlighten and/or inspire a dev newbie.
For myself, this is a rare occasion, and it is these moments that make me very conscience of my own personal experience. But, when tasked to provide perspective, it is important to filter out the struggles and long hours of debugging. Everyone is entitled to build their own experiences, after all, and TMI might have a detrimental impact.
With that said, I look back at that moment and regret maybe having said too much. It is in my nature, to illustrate the long road ahead when I speak to students - looking back, I can say I never had a true computer science mentor. But, if given the chance again, it would be much more beneficial to provide just the tools and resources and a simple “Go get ‘em Tiger”.
In the end, it still humors me when I think about the absent look on the student’s face as I kept dropping bits of dev minutiae.