What to do if you’re a bad developer

I’ve come to the realization that I’m bad at BBQ.

I’ve watched and rewatched hours of BBQ tutorials, read countless recipes, and troubleshooted across the entire end of the internet and back… but BBQ has just not come naturally to me.

Recently, after burning yet another set of burgers, my wife caught me staring lifelessly to the yard. BBQ had broken me.

But there was hope!

I remembered Aaron Franklin, the world’s greatest BBQ pitmaster, who famously started off by making horrible BBQ. I thought, “If he became a great BBQ pitmaster, maybe I can too!”

Then it really hit me. I used to be a really, really bad developer too.

After I completed multiple programming classes, read Head First Java, and finished a book on Salesforce development, I finally mustered up the courage to write my first production trigger.

The trigger was just 5 lines of code and it was virtually an exact copy of a trigger in the book.

Embarrassingly, it took me 8 hours to write this trigger:

trigger DefaultOwner on Account (before insert) {
  for (Account acc : Trigger.new) {
    acc.OwnerId = '005i0000000OAO9AAO';
  }
}

That’s 1 minute to copy/paste most of it, 1 hour to write the third line, and 7 hours to debug it.

My first trigger was horrible.

…Just like my first BBQ.

…Just like Aaron Franklin’s first BBQ.

But I stuck with it. And I’m sharing this story with you here today because I did. None of my career would have happened otherwise – SFDC99, Google, MVP, Hoodie, etc.

It makes you wonder – what other great careers never happened because people gave up too early?!