Ask HN: How do you know if you're a good dev or not?

I'm happy to recount that I solved a problem by recognizing exactly what kind of parser was needed, but there was also that time Nate took a month of vacation, and I'd only written 30 useful lines of code for his project when he returned. Development is a creative process and therefore a mess of too much effort and too much ego. So I count projects and times the client was happy, or we got hacked the first day of deployment, or our work won the next grant.

But try this: Find someone friendly and interested and buy them a beer or an Amazon gift card or a snazzy keyboard in return for reviewing some of your code. Learn and get socialized, like taking your pup to the dog park. Make yourself acceptable enough to be hirable, and maybe that's enough.

Look back at your code, see how many man-hours it has saved AND cost, subtract the two, and there's your answer :)

When i sit back, look at what I've made and proclaim out loud GD that's f'ing awesome.

Then my wife looks at me like I'm crazy and I get back to work.

At first I thought I was a great dev because my boss routinely praises me as an unqualified genius and savior of the company! And this is like 2 to 3 times a week.

But then I jump on HN and read all the "Signs you're a bad developer" articles and discover that I'm actually a two-bit mediocre hack.

I dunno.

You built good software.

How good? So good no one else has even thought of, and actually written, that software before.

When I show my mither my name in the about box.

I commonly find that what my clients want is not what I regard myself as ethically obligated to deliver, that is I give them what they need and not what they ask for.

I use butterflies to write my code.

https://xkcd.com/378/

when your boss comes over and high fives you, slaps you on the ass and then says way to go brah!