Failure, a very important aspect of our lives, might make us disheartened sometimes. However, it most always results in awareness of what doesn’t work.
In my 7th grade home economics class we had to make a book with a lot of different small projects and because of my creative nature I did not rely on just writing text on a simple page. I instead found various shaped utensils in the house and drew them on the page - and to make it look unique I used watercolors. To my amazement, instead of encouraging me, my teacher threw my project book away, saying how messy it was, and not like the others. From that moment until today it still hurts me to see how creativity is suppressed in our everyday lives, especially when it is directed towards young children with such impressionable minds.
Despite this demoralizing incident it did not stop my creative nature, and I decided from that point forward, to take full ownership of my life and not allow anyone else’s opinion to dictate what I could and couldn’t do. I remained steadfast to my own conviction and passion for expression of my creativity and to a career, all the way achieving my Master in Computer Science in 2003. I soon after moved to the US and started a family. A nice surprise came when after having moved to the U.S.; I began to notice how accepting the U.S. was of different cultures and ways of thinking…and I was even more surprised when my kids started school and they were able to write whatever they wanted for a question or project, and express themselves creatively, true to their nature.
But as a very popular saying “History repeats itself”, I recently encountered another similar situation which reminded me of my 7th grade project and how I felt standing in front of my teacher’s desk trying to understand what went wrong.
In a recent code assignment that I worked on for a job interview, I went beyond expected methods and simple techniques. In order to do this assignment I decided to use the Laravel framework. Despite the fact that this particular framework was new to me I was able to use it effectively and the final result was more than my expectations. My final app had all from a DFD (Data Flow Diagram) to a blog stating whole process of setting up the environment to start a Laravel project. I was also able to use PHP artisan commands using Composer and Eloquent in order to provide ORM (Object Relation Mapping). I also utilized Ajax in order to display everything on a single page.
And just like all other web developers I love each of my projects as if they are my children. I was so happy to see the final result. It looked like a fully functional app with questions, DFD, blog and a solution page. However after demonstrating my assignment in the final interview I was rejected because my code was of a different style than what was expected. I was immediately transported to when I was 11 years old and rejected because my style was different.
It would have been easy for me to transport myself back to the same way I felt in that 7th grade class and assume that the problem this time wasn’t me or my code, but that it was in the employer’s willingness to consider an alternate coding style. However, looking at this experience objectively I realized there must be something to learn from it. Thinking about both the 7th grade and this coding assignment I realized there were a lot of similarities in both incidents. For example, each time I myself assumed a lot of things. For this recent code assignment, I did not consider tackling the problem in the most basic and concise way, and instead chose a much more involved and unique coding process. While I did theoretically complete the coding assignment to achieve the required result, my execution was quite different than what the employer expected.
In other words, I did not proactively ask questions to the employer during the initial development process as I should have, preventing me from understanding their exact expectations. While this was painful to realize, it was an eye-opening epiphany for me. Going forward, I am sure I won’t repeat this again in my life, as the most popular saying of Shaykh Saadi “ With the ignominy of asking questions comes the pride of wisdom”.
And the most important thing in a developer’s life is “Curiosity”