New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Is it OK to not have a “thing”?
Ask HN: Is it OK to not have a “thing”?
7 by bhub | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I'm currently going through a bit of a struggle with what I do. I've been programming for over 20 years now and in that time I've explored a lot of corners of software development and computers in general. I started with C/C++ and wrote games and played around with game engines. I learned PHP and SQL to generate basic "dynamic" sites. I learned Python and wrote commandline tools and Qt applications. Moved to Flask/Django to create websites and extended my knowledge with JS, React, and learned how to set up servers. I played around with security, reverse engineering, exploit development, web hacking, and malware analysis. I'm learning Elixir now. I've dicked around with arduinos, raspis, and simple circuitry. I've put in place devops processes and tools where I work. I dabbled with image processing, VR, and interactive experiences. Yet I wouldn't consider myself particularly knowledgeable in any one of those things. There's people who find their niche and they learn more about it each day and never tire of it, but I can't seem to find that thing myself. At work I often do a number of different things, so again, I'm not solely focused on one thing. The biggest issue is that it makes looking for work difficult as I can't say I'm an expert in say micro services, or I'm a React pro, nor that I am an expert Python developer. Apart from saying you're a "generalist", how do you best sell yourself when you don't have a specialisation or a specific area you are focused on?
7 by bhub | 1 comments on Hacker News.
I'm currently going through a bit of a struggle with what I do. I've been programming for over 20 years now and in that time I've explored a lot of corners of software development and computers in general. I started with C/C++ and wrote games and played around with game engines. I learned PHP and SQL to generate basic "dynamic" sites. I learned Python and wrote commandline tools and Qt applications. Moved to Flask/Django to create websites and extended my knowledge with JS, React, and learned how to set up servers. I played around with security, reverse engineering, exploit development, web hacking, and malware analysis. I'm learning Elixir now. I've dicked around with arduinos, raspis, and simple circuitry. I've put in place devops processes and tools where I work. I dabbled with image processing, VR, and interactive experiences. Yet I wouldn't consider myself particularly knowledgeable in any one of those things. There's people who find their niche and they learn more about it each day and never tire of it, but I can't seem to find that thing myself. At work I often do a number of different things, so again, I'm not solely focused on one thing. The biggest issue is that it makes looking for work difficult as I can't say I'm an expert in say micro services, or I'm a React pro, nor that I am an expert Python developer. Apart from saying you're a "generalist", how do you best sell yourself when you don't have a specialisation or a specific area you are focused on?
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