When I first started transitioning from design into development I felt like I was walking into a new universe. The layers of complexity beneath the thin veneer of design finally came into focus. How little I knew. How much I needed to learn. The roadmap to becoming an effective developer clarified in my mind and it was overwhelming – a bit scary to be honest. The confidence I had as a designer began to drain. Even the most basic client projects felt challenging due to all the technological factors that I just never really thought about as a designer.
Eventually though, I learned enough as a developer to move beyond the basic HTML and CSS projects. Around this time, a good friend of mine referred me to a client that needed an independent developer to build a website using some of the various APIs their company had created.
With this particular project, even though I knew the basics of leveraging APIs with web tools and technologies, I was very uncertain how to proceed. The information I needed to do my job was not well documented, or at least, because of my inexperience at the time I felt like it was not well documented. I scheduled a meeting with two of the engineers to try and ask for help. I remember feeling so afraid of looking like a fool, that even just speaking plainly to these more experienced engineers felt incredibly difficult. Why was I afraid? Perhaps, I did not want to admit I needed help? You may think that it seems strange that one would schedule a meeting for help and then find themselves incapable of asking. Yet, as strange as it may seem, this tends to be a common paradox of the human condition 🙂. We all want to improve, but we don't seem to want to admit to our weaknesses.
I don't remember what I said exactly in that meeting, but I was able to muster up the courage to admit that I felt stuck and unsure of how to proceed. As a contractor, this might strike you as not the best thing to admit to a client, and that may be true in some cases. However, the prudent course of action when you are in a broken state is to weigh your options and choose the best one you have. In my case, the two engineers were happy to help get me unstuck. Fifteen minutes later I had learned a couple of new tricks and felt confident to continue the job.
From then on, our working relationship felt easier. It became easier to be my authentic self at work. We had regular check-ins and stand-up meetings (which of course is very normal at any tech company), and I began to offer more opinions about the work and about the project. Asking for help when I needed it wasn't a problem anymore. Our trust in each other cultivated a richer work product. Because of my input and the input we all provided, the company began to reiterate on the design of the APIs themselves. They changed the direction and approach the company took to serving their users. Pretty cool!
Letting your guard down, showing your authentic self, and revealing some of your vulnerabilities once in a while will give others the opportunity to see the real you. It gives your colleagues a chance to understand you better, get to know what motivates you, how you think and what you believe in. It may even earn you a little respect.
Terms
API
If you have never heard this term before, API means application programming interface. API in the web development context often indicates a specific kind of API which helps the developer read, write and display data to the user – the REST API. APIs of all sorts (whether for web development or otherwise) exist for one reason: to abstract away complexity so it is easier to interact with the underlying software. APIs operate on a set of standards so that their usage is predictable. This way devs can more easily leverage the data or software that is made available to them. For instance, APIs might be used to retrieve the latest movie reviews and display them in your web browser so the user can figure out what they would like to watch on TV. Learning how to leverage REST APIs effectively is an essential skill to learn in web development.