Good, Better, Best Developer

As a beginner, the main question I asked myself was: “How to become the best developer?” Of course, then, as a beginner, I certainly wasn’t the best. Maybe I was the best in my house or in my village. For larger ranges, I needed a lot more knowledge and experience.

When I stopped building my portfolio, I started building myself. This way I became the best developer to myself.

If you think that knowledge and experience are important, you are right. What is equally important, and what I will write about here, you won’t read elsewhere.

This story has been in my mind for a long time, so I think it’s time to share it with you. Thus, I will cease to be a selfish owner of useful principles that I fully live in and that make my life exciting and successful, and bring fulfillment and peace to me.

Stop Building a Portfolio — Build Yourself

In the first years of learning and working as a web designer/developer, my main goal was to have as much and as good as possible projects in my portfolio. As you already know, a good portfolio brings new and better projects and clients. That all makes sense.

What happened to me, and, I believe, to many of you, was that I worked solely for the sake of my portfolio. That was my try to build authority and gain respect from the local community, friends, parents or who knows more whom.

When I got to the point where I no longer needed a portfolio to get a new project, I started thinking about whether I needed all of that.

In a nutshell, I didn’t!

A Lack of Focus

In the first few years of my freelance career, I lived a double life. One as an ordinary young man who did everything that his peers do, and the other as a freelancer who works late at night.

The biggest mistake I made was that I didn’t spend more time hanging out with people who love and do similar things. Maybe I should have attended or organized more meetups, conferences, and lived less like other peers.

The combination of these two styles is quite strenuous physically and mentally. It was very easy for me to stray from my goals. Then I would wise up and get back on track.

The key moment that directed me to build myself, rather than my portfolio, was when I left college.

The All or Nothing Moment

After completing 4 semesters, I attended a few lectures on the fifth, and I realized soon that this was not the direction I wanted to develop to.

Of course, my parents did not accept this easily, but they supported me. I was determined in my ideas.

In the first year, after leaving college, I did a few projects for clients and was eagerly preparing a Web Design Course. That was something mine. During this course, I met a wonderful person, and after a year we got married.

I may not have known what I was doing, but I knew very well where I was going. Of course, she kept me mentally sound all these years and gave me the necessary gentle pressure and support.

From a professional point of view, I have made it clear to myself what I want to learn, what path I need to go to achieve my goals.

With each project I did, I was adding a piece of the puzzle to a thoughtful picture of what I wanted to become. I was more looking forward to the new things I learned than the honorarium I earned.

The Results Were Coming

After 5 years, this attitude took us from a village in Bosnia to Berlin and Frankfurt, and here we are in Berlin again.

During this period, I used to attend conferences, meetups, and meet people who love and do the same as I do. I even dared to sign up for a talk at WordPress meetup in Zagreb. It was a stressful experience, but very rewarding.

I met a lot of good people from the web development world through whom I reached clients that I would never reach otherwise.

Good things take time, and it doesn’t matter how long you wait, but how you act while you’re waiting.

A Plateau of Life

In the meantime, we became parents. Watching a little, helpless child speeded up and helped to understand and getting to know ourselves.

At the beginning of this story, I was in the fog imagining the desired goal. But now the fog has gone. The image has become clear and the real values were engraved in every damask of my being.

Hold On to Your Values

Guided by the theory that explains the world through vibration, I manage to create my own life framework which works. From an early age, I have been listening about how happy I am in life and how positive things happen to me “on their own”.

For a while, I believed that I was just born like that— lucky, until I got to know other people better. The core values that I live by are civilizational and spiritual values.

For example, it is inconceivable for me that a man is able to kill a man. Not because someone, or religion, taught me that. No. That’s because I, deep in myself, believe that’s evil, and that there is no legitimate reason why someone would be able to do that.

I wouldn’t like to be stolen, fooled, hurt and harmed in any way, so I don’t do the same to others. Stubbornly and principally I strive to be positive.

Challenges

With the mind setup like this, the biggest challenge is to handle yourself. How to maintain a balance between the conscious and the unconscious mind, between thoughts and feelings, and between consciousness and subconsciousness.

We can be good to ourselves only when we’re in balance. When we are good to ourselves, we are happy and satisfied, and we can be the best version of ourselves to all those we care about.

I learned how to recognize when I’m out of balance. It allows me to protect the people I love from myself.

I deeply believe that, because of this attitude and behavior, I attract many positive things, many everyday circumstances bear out on the basis of that. I am stubborn about it because I know that integrity and truth are the strongest power.

Repetitio est mater studiorum

Repetition is the mother of all learning! Recent research has proven that it is possible to reprogram our subconsciousness. When I first heard about it, I was very excited. Of course, the question arises — how is this possible?

Our subconsciousness is over 90% of our behavior, fears, happiness, decisions… In our subconsciousness are stored all of our traumas — those we remember, as well as those we do not.

If we could find an easy way to reprogram the subconsciousness, we would be able to change the world completely.

There are proven methods by which we can still reprogram the subconsciousness. One of them is repetition. The top athletes are evidence of this.

Taking basketball players as an example, they repeat the shooting in their training throughout their careers, they repeat the fundamentals of the game throughout their lives to have the full confidence to shoot the buzzer-beater one-legged three-pointer at the moment when they are expected to.

I honestly believe that if we keep fit and repeat the fundamentals every day, with the help of imagination, we can do amazing things. By repeating what we know, we develop self-confidence.

I’ve already written about self-confidence in social media.

The super powers we imagined as children do exist! They are all contained in one word — self-confidence.

That is why it is very important that the fundamentals are constantly repeated because the fundamentals are the building material for big things.

Conclusion

People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes

Yuval Harari — Homo Deus

It’s easy to be the best developer and the best in anything. We all think we had a difficult childhood, poor conditions, a lack of money… It’s our “lizard brain” that doesn’t allow us to take a step forward towards the change.

These are excuses and we know that. Based on this text, you could conclude that I went through all the stages. The fears I had just 6 months ago are ridiculous today.

I used to stay awake at nights and read about the brain, the human being, functions, behaviors, and many other things just to be able to understand what keeps me from my goal, and how to keep myself focused on what makes me happy.

We should work on ourselves, painstakingly correcting bad behaviors that have been etched in our being. Repeating new behaviors and habits, stubbornly, just to reprogram the subconsciousness and trigger an avalanche of other beneficial changes is the key to leveling up.

It’s not hard to avoid being touched by other people’s anger, devotion, and malice. On the contrary, we need to compassionate with them because we should know full well that all negativity comes from the individual’s own misfortune and dissatisfaction.

It’s nice to live life to the fullest. I want that for all of you! All the best!