Upping My Game as a Developer

I've been a software engineer for about 13 years or so.  For the last 4 years, I've been at a senior level at the companies where I've worked.  But I came to realize something over the last few months: I have a tendency to seek out the easiest ways to learn new things. 

Case in point: when it came to learning new technologies, many of my colleagues tended to read many pages of official documentation while I tended to ignore the documentation and look for videos or targeted googling to learn.  This works fine much of the time, so I still learn it.  But the point is that I was almost unable to learn from the actual documentation.  I recognized that there was a bit of a hole in my skillset as a senior developer, and it was up to me to fill it.

So over the last couple weeks, i challenged myself to dig deep in the official documentation for the technologies I used at work.  When something challenged me, I tried going first to the official docs to see if I could find the answer there.  It wasn't easy for me, but I did solve all of the issues I was facing over the last two weeks.

But more than that, I feel I have stepped up my game as a software engineer.  I don't feel like the documentation is just a reference tool or just for the smarter devs.  I feel like I'm writing better code and understanding it more.  It reminds me of the time I dove in Shakespeare as a Senior in high school and really understood it for the first time.  That developed a lifelong appreciation for and understanding of Shakespeare.  I hope the same becomes true for understanding documentation in my software development work too.

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