Failure Will Make You a Better JavaScript Developer

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Topics

The Comfort Zone

• This is usually where we spend most of our time
• It’s a safe place where you use the skills and technology you are familiar and comfortable with
• You convince yourself that you don’t need to know more than what you already know 
• This can relate to learning new technology or putting yourself out there and meeting new people
• Growth happens outside the comfort zone
• You need to be ok with failing

Learn to Fail

• Learning to fail is not something you can just switch on in your brain and do, you need to practice at it
• Start small, attend a virtual meetup, join and participate in a discord community, build a small app in a new technology
• In all of these examples, you will probably have misfires, stutters and failures
  - You say something you think is weird at a meetup
  - You don’t get a good welcome in a Discord community
  - You can figure out a feature in the new tech
• These are your first tests to see how you respond to failure, do you give up or to do continue on and try something different?
• Different types of failure:
  - Tech Choice: Choosing the wrong technology for the job (ie Mike chose Grid before it was supported by all major browsers leading to a scramble)
  - Implementation: Not being able to implement a feature (ie Mike implemented a slideshow that had a memory leak on devices that ran all day)
  - Social: Saying the wrong thing during a meetup, conference, meeting, Not responding to a message
• Be comfortable being uncomfortable
  - When taking on new projects/contracts I’m perfectly ok with using technology and skills that I haven’t used before.
  - I tend to look for a 60/40 split, where 60% of what I’ll be doing is in my comfort zone and 40% is directly outside of it
  - For example, I’ve worked with node js and react but never used Next.js before. I took a project that required Next and was able to successfully complete it even though a good portion of the tech was new to me
• Ok you failed, so what?
  - Unless you’re designing life-critical/finance-critical systems so what if your code doesn’t run correctly?
  - So what if you take an extra day or two to complete a feature?
  - So what if you need to refactor a portion of your code because you chose the wrong framework/tech
  - So what if you said the wrong thing at the wrong time? (Ok maybe apologize here if it was actually bad)
  - Even large financial systems are built on top of failures
• Battling through anger/disappointment
  - You don’t want to be the person that has to sit out of a group activity, sitting there all day on their phone

When to Give Up/When to Accept Failure

• It’s different for every single situation
• Burnout symptoms are something you need to learn to figure out
  - Hating to wake up in the morning because of what you’re working on
• If your negativity or failure is directly affecting other people negatively
  - For a significant amount of time
• Is it ever acceptable to give up?
  - Yes
• Sunk cost fallacy 
• Take the lessons from the failure and move on