Today I want to share the story why I actually started this blog. I often wanted to start blogging and share my experience and knowledge. But every time I started, I wrote two or three posts and then I stopped, because I have no time, found no topics, just want to relax after a hard day at work, and other flimsy excuses…
Expressing Knowledge
In the last months, I realize, that it is kind of hard for me to express my knowledge. For me it seems that if I go to technical interviews for new customers and projects, everybody thinks “Oh yes, she’s a good junior developer. We can work with that.”. Excuse me, did you say junior? I have about ten years experience as a Java developer. I know a lot of things, I made a lot of experiences, I just can’t remember all the technical terms. Even in topics I really care about I need to relearn every now and than what the details are. Of course I know the SOLID principles! – But could you please explain the Liskov Substitution Principle? – Well, … ähm …, of course I know that, but … I’m out. – What do you say about “methods using references to a base class must be able to use objects of a derived classes without knowing it”? – Yes that’s obvious, isn’t it? Ah yes, that’s the LSP…
And algorithms? I studied business informatics, so I think I have a gap here. To close it (and knowing I’m not that good in remembering all the sorting algorithms from my studies), I took an algorithm course last year. Great! So what is the fastest sorting algorithm? – Depends on the input. – Right, and what if I have a random unsorted list? – Damn, which was the good one… Mergesort? Quicksort? … Damn.
That sounds terrible I know. What has she done all the years? She can’t be a really good programmer! But I am! Believe me, I learn so much new stuff, I read books, blogs, experiment with programming languages, architectures and tools, I visit conferences, and so on. But I can’t remember the technical terms and all the details.
The Plan
And here’s my plan: Persist my knowledge and learning how to express it by writing blog posts. And if someone ever think I’m not a skilled and experienced programmer, because I messed up the interview, I’ll just give him the link to the blog.
Creating a blog
Great idea, but I already know how that ends. I’ll write a few post and after that I’ll losing interest.. So I decided to give it a try and at least I have a great domain and a huge backlog.
Now I try to work on my consistency. We’ll see if this works for me. But this time I am confident! And within the next project they will see me as an experienced developer within the interview and not only after we worked together in a team.
