How long did it take you to think you were a good coder?

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Carlos Matias La Borde

The time between when I thought I was a good coder and when I actually was was maybe a good 6 or 7 years.
As these sorts of curves of ignorance and competence usually tend to work.
I think at some point I realized two things that made me relatively confident:

• I could deliver good, maintainable code very quickly
• I could learn new frameworks and dive into new spaces very quickly, with confidence and achieve significant results within just a few months

The first required some conscious rewiring of some bad habits I'd developed. I already knew how to solve them, I just had to force myself to stick with them. My project code today is far better than it was a few years ago. I think in a couple years it will be a bit better than it is now, but the difference won't be as large.
The second just required me to take on a disparate array of projects where I felt far out of my depth and just struggle with the infrastructure and the systems and the code until I felt confident that I could hit all the right points to make them bend within a short time frame.
The code itself takes a comparably trivial amount of time to develop, most of it's just getting the systems and the permissions and the setup done. Writing the code for pretty much anything generally only takes me 3-8 weeks depending on the project scope if I'm doing it right.
Then the testing tends to be drawn out for decision reasons, but still reasonably quick and iterative.
Do all of that stuff enough and you'll feel competent and confident in your abilities.


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