As a software developer, you have to become comfortable with the fact that your work is never truly done. The software you create will always be a work in progress. When you code that last feature or fix that last bug, another one will pop up soon enough.
Also, as you keep learning, you’ll find better patterns that you want to use, or new standards that you want to implement. If you don’t stop yourself, you’ll quickly go down the rabbit hole, only waking up after you’ve sunk many hours to refactor your whole code base. At some point, you have to let it go and ship anyway, because it’s never going to be perfect.
Good software is like a garden. You can pull all the weeds and clean up, but be quick to congratulate yourself because it will stay neat for approximately a day. After this, new weeds will have grown and you’ll have to start over again. Perfection is fleeting in software and in gardening: the best you can do is making sure it’s not overrun by weeds and bugs.
Likewise, there are new languages, frameworks and tools coming out all the time, and you need to keep learning to stay up to date. You don’t have to jump on every bandwagon: many skills can be learned as you need them. On the other hand, changes like new browsers and OS versions will force you to adapt even if you would have preferred working on a new feature instead.
It’s humbling to let go if you’re a recovering perfectionist. When you started out, small problems could be “solved”, and a class could be “completed”, but real life is more complex than this. Life will throw you curveballs, and you won’t be able to reach inbox zero. It won’t come easy at first, but stay mindful that you’re doing your best, but can’t do it all. You’ll learn to be at peace with it, but even this is always a work in progress.
| Reference: | Your job will never be done from our WCG partner Cindy Potvin at the Web, Mobile and Android Programming blog. |
