Tell HN: Confessions of a Prideful Junior Programmer

I don't have 25 years of experience in the industry. So I don't have a lot of advice to give but I can share something with the community.

Here are biggest delusions I overcame, throughout my 7 year career.

1. Shared Hosting(Cpanel) is not beneath me.

Seduced by Hype Driven development, I wanted to pad my resume by learning the latest technologies. Why would I host my site on shared hosting? No real programmer would use phpmyadmin, my project would have 1M users on day one, I needed a bare metal VPS. The irony is that I ended up recreating a buggy, half baked version of CPanel.

2. PHP is beneath me.

I was ashamed to tell people I use php. On reddit, youtube and HN real programmers used Haskell and React. Everything should be a bloated javascript SPA, with an overly complex toolchain. Since the average joe without formal training could figure out how to FTP files and have a site running, I needed to be different. I was too good for PHP.

3. Wordpress is beneath me.

I was afraid that people would "view source" on my project, see that it's built with Wordpress. I thought they would silently judge me. I wasted months upon months, re-inventing the wheel, I could have delivered a working product in a matter of weeks.

All this to say.

I might never build a product that reaches 100k active users. My product might never make it on top of Hacker News, It might never get featured on TechCrunch and it's okay.

I don't have to be the best programmer in the world. It's okay to build little programs and apps for small businesses, with a simple database and a simple front-end.

I might never work for a MicroMetaGooAppleZon, it's okay too. I might never break into high 6 figures and it's okay too.

This was the best realization I made.

Life is good once I figured that out.

Thanks for reading.