Something NONE of us?need!
Greg Turnquist
Senior Staff Technical Content Engineer at Cockroach Labs, Best-Selling Author, Conference Speaker, and YouTube Content Creator
There is a phenomena out there you may have run into, in one form or another…
The Arrival?Syndrome
You’ve probably seen it in others. It’s scarier to see it manifest in yourself.
It’s basically a state of mind where you (or someone else) has a feeling of, “I’ve arrived!” It implies that you learned what had to be learned, you applied it, and now all is done and well.
So what’s wrong with that?
Simply put, it suggests a state of mind where you don’t have to learn any more. There is no more growing to be done. Almost as if everything is smooth sailing.
And that’s the problem.
There is a saying I first heard of in German:
Um ein Meister zu werden, muss man immer ein Schüler bleiben
Translated, it reads, “To become a master, one must always remain a student.” We must continue to grow and to learn. When we stop learning, then we began to atrophy.
As a keen example, I myself have studied and use SQL for years. I once had a textbook on ORACLE/SQL from college that I reached for all the time when I started working on a contract…in 2001!
Way back in 2001, I had no clue what a LEFT OUTER JOIN was. In case you didn’t know, that’s when the values on the left-hand side of the query are required, but the values on the right-hand side are optional. Suffice it to say, LEFT OUTER JOINs are used ALL THE TIME, so there was no NOT learning this concept.
By the time I left that contract to join the Spring team in 2010, LEFT OUTER JOINs were burned into my brain amidst other SQL and relational database concepts.
Another 14 years passes by, and I find myself as a technical content engineer with Cockroach Labs where I’m helping to fashion content to train our paying customers. This includes some of the most advanced SQL. Given CockroachDB’s distributed highly available nature, we are having to coach them on various SQL practices.
It’s in early 2024 that I first see mention of CTEs or Common Table Expressions.
领英推荐
Hmm. Never heard of that. Okay, I HAD heard of that, the previous year, when Hibernate 6 added CTEs to Hibernate Query Language and I modded Spring Data JPA’s query parser to handle them.
Time to study up on this technology…
…that became a part of SQL in 2001.
Gulp.
Way back when I didn’t know LEFT OUTER JOINs, CTEs had entered the arena. I knew nothing about them. It’s kind of humbling to get kicked in the gut like that after working in this industry for 27 years.
It’s vital that no matter how seasoned we become, no matter how much expertise we accrue, that we ALWAYS remain open to continued learning and growth.
The hard thing is, that requires a certain level of humility. Especially if the source of further growth comes from the next generation of pro coders.
But if you include learning as a key thing of being a pro coder, and make sure to not skip over present and future opportunies to keep learning, it will serve you well.
If you’re a pro coder or plan to become one then stay tuned for my next article. But if you simply can’t wait then check out the video linked below and learn why the tech stack you pick DOESN’T REALLY MATTER!
?—?Greg